Software professionals' information needs in continuous integration and delivery

• Continuous integration and delivery consolidate several activities, ranging from frequent code changes to compiling, building, testing, and deployment to customers. During these activities, software professionals seek additional information to perform the task at hand. Developers that spend a considerable amount of time and effort to identify such information can be distracted from doing productive work. By identifying the types of information that software professionals seek, we can better understand the processes, practices, and tools that are required to develop a quality product on time. A better understanding of the information needs of software practitioners has several benefits, such as staying competitive, increasing awareness of the issues that can hinder a timely release, and building a visualization tool that can help practitioners to address their information needs. We conducted a multiple-case holistic study with 5 different companies (34 unique participants) to identify information needs in continuous integration and delivery. This study attempts to capture the importance, frequency, required effort (e.g., sequence of actions required to collect information), current approach to handling, and associated stakeholders with respect to identified needs. We identified 27 information needs associated with different stakeholders (i.e., developers, testers, project managers, release team, and compliance authority). The identified needs were categorized as testing, code & commit, confidence, bug, and artifacts. We discussed whether the information needs were aligned with the tools used to address them.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Programvaruteknik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Software Engineering (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

question developers ask

information needs

continuous integration and delivery

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)