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As the amount of information online continues to grow, a correspondingly important opportunity is for individuals to reuse knowledge which has been summarized by others rather than starting from scratch. However, appropriate reuse requires judging the relevance, trustworthiness, and thoroughness of others' knowledge in relation to an individual's goals and context. In this work, we explore augmenting judgements of the appropriateness of reusing knowledge in the domain of programming, specifically of reusing artifacts that result from other developers' searching and decision making. Through an analysis of prior research on sensemaking and trust, along with new interviews with developers, we synthesized a framework for reuse judgements. The interviews also validated that developers express a desire for help with judging whether to reuse an existing decision. From this framework, we developed a set of techniques for capturing the initial decision maker's behavior and visualizing signals calculated based on the behavior, to facilitate subsequent consumers' reuse decisions, instantiated in a prototype system called Strata. Results of a user study suggest that the system significantly improves the accuracy, depth, and speed of reusing decisions. These results have implications for systems involving user-generated content in which other users need to evaluate the relevance and trustworthiness of that content. 

Developers spend a significant portion of their time searching for solutions and methods online. While numerous tools have been developed to support this exploratory process, in many cases the answers to developers’ questions involve trade-offs among multiple valid options and not just a single solution. Through interviews, we discovered that developers express a desire for help with decision-making and understanding trade-offs. Through an analysis of Stack Overflow posts, we observed that many answers describe such trade-offs. These findings suggest that tools designed to help a developer capture information and make decisions about trade-offs can provide crucial benefits for both the developers and others who want to understand their design rationale. In this work, we probe this hypothesis with a prototype system named Unakite that collects, organizes, and keeps track of information about tradeoffs and builds a comparison table, which can be saved as a design rationale for later use. Our evaluation results show that Unakite reduces the cost of capturing tradeoff-related information by 45%, and that the resulting comparison table speeds up a subsequent developer’s ability to understand the trade-offs by about a factor of three. 

Programmers consistently engage in cognitively demanding tasks such as sensemaking and decision-making. During the information-foraging process, programmers are growing more reliant on resources available online since they contain masses of crowdsourced information and are easier to navigate. Content available in questions and answers on Stack Overflow presents a unique platform for studying the types of problems encountered in programming and possible solutions. In addition to classifying these questions, we introduce possible visual representations for organizing the gathered information and propose that such models may help reduce the cost of navigating, understanding and choosing solution alternatives. 

UNAKITE is a new system that supports developers in collecting, organizing, consuming, and persisting design rationales while solving problems using web resources. Understanding design rationale has widely been recognized as significant for the success of a software engineering project. However, it is currently both time and labor intensive for little immediate payoff for a developer to generate and embed a useful design rationale in their code. Under this cost structure, there is very little effective tool support to help developers keep track of design rationales. UNAKITE addresses this challenge for some design decisions by changing the cost structure: developers are incentivized to make decisions using UNAKITE’s collecting and organizing mechanisms as it makes tracking and deciding between alternatives easier than before; the structure thus generated is automatically embedded in the code as the design rationale when the developer copies sample code into their existing code. In a preliminary usability study, developers found UNAKITE to be usable for capturing design rationales and effective for interpreting the rationale of others. 

Programmers spend a significant proportion of their time searching for and making sense of complex information. However, they often lack effective tools to help them make sense of the information, turn it into knowledge, or share it with their respective communities. In this position paper, we aim to help programmers collect, navigate, and organize knowledge to meet their goals while capturing this knowledge and making it useful for later programmers with similar needs. We describe barriers and challenges to creating this sustainable cycle, and we explore the design space and opportunities for effective tools and systems.