Putting information foraging theory to work: Community-based design patterns for programming tools.

The design of programming tools is slow and costly. To ease this process, we developed a design pattern catalog aimed at providing guidance for tool designers. This catalog is grounded in Information Foraging Theory (IFT), which empirical studies have shown to be useful for understanding how developers look for information during development tasks. New design patterns, authored by members of the research community for the catalog, concretely explain how to apply IFT in tool design. In our evaluation, qualitative analyses revealed the community-written design patterns compared well in quality to patterns that we had ourselves published in a smaller, peer-reviewed catalog.