View article

When learning a new technology, programmers often have to sift through multiple online resources to find information that addresses their questions. Prior work has reported that information seekers use a number of different strategies, including following scents, or indicators, to locate appropriate resources. We present a qualitative and quantitative investigation of how programmers learning a new technology employ these strategies to navigate between online resources and evaluate the pertinence of these resources. We performed a diary and interview study with ten programmers learning a new technology, to study how users navigate from the question they have to the resource that satisfies this need. Based on our observations, we propose a resource-seeking model that represents the online resource seeking behaviour of programmers when learning a new technology. The model is comprised of six …