Investigating the value of retention actions as a source of relevance information in the software development environment

Even though there exists a number of search solutions targetted at software engineers the literature suggests that they are not widely used by the people engaged in code delivery [26]. Moreover, current code focused information retrieval systems such as Google Code Search (discontinued), Codeplex or Koders produce results based on specific keywords and therefore they do not take into account user context such as location, browsing history, previous interaction patterns and domain expertise. In this paper we discuss the development of task-specific information retrieval systems for software engineers. We discuss how software engineers interact with information and information retrieval systems and investigate to what extent a domain-specific search and recommendation system can be developed in order to support their work related activities. We have conducted a user study: a questionnaire and an automated observation of user interactions with the browser and software development environment. We discuss factors that can be used as implicit feedback indicators for further collaborative filtering and discuss how these parameters can be analysed using Computational Intelligence based techniques.