A Quantitative Analysis of Developer Information Needs in Software Ecosystems

We present the results of an investigation into the nature of information needs of software developers who work in projects that are part of larger ecosystems. This work is based on a quantitative survey of 75 professional software developers. We corroborate the results identified in the survey with needs and motivations proposed in a previous survey and discover that tool support for developers working in an ecosystem context is even more meager than we thought: mailing lists and internet search are the most popular tools developers use to satisfy their ecosystem-related information needs.

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