Context for Software Developers

The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers interested in studying the information that software developers need to successfully complete their development tasks. Developers routinely face challenging development tasks that require a wealth of detailed support information, such as change history, the architecture, who is working on what, the APIs, and so on. As developers work on their task, they can be found searching, navigating, and enriching this information. Organizationally, developers coordinate their work, tasks, and hold discussions by having a shared understanding of information about the projects they work on. Indeed, all the information about software creates the context in which developers work. Today, the context that developers work with comes from many sources; as such, it is multi-faceted and increasingly large in scale. Having many sources of context causes a considerable amount of context switching during the developers work activity. Capturing, making sense of and presenting this multi-faceted context to developers is one important open problem in this area.