Determining Relevancy: How Software Developers Determine Relevant Information in Feeds

Authors: Thomas Fritz, Gail C. Murphy

Finding relevant information within the vast amount of information exchanged via feeds is difficult. Previous research into this problem has largely focused on recommending relevant information based on topicality. By not considering individual and situational factors these approaches fall short. Through a formative, interview-based study, we explored how five software developers determined relevancy of items in two kinds of project news feeds. We identified four factors that the developers used to help determine relevancy and found that placement of items in source code and team contexts can ease the determination of relevancy.

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