Determining Relevancy: How Software Developers Determine Relevant Information in Feeds

Finding relevant information within the vast amount of information exchanged via streams, such as provided by Twitter or Facebook, is difficult. Previous research into this problem has largely focused on recommending relevant information based on topicality. By not considering individual and situational factors that can affect whether information is relevant, these approaches fall short. Through a formative, interview-based study, we explored how five software developers from a team determined relevancy of items in two kinds of project news feeds. We identified four factors that the developers used to help determine relevancy and found that placement of items in source code and team contexts can ease the determination of relevancy.