Developers Foraging Behavior in Code Hosting Sites: A Gender Perspective.

Code hosting sites, like GitHub, contains an overwhelming number of projects, making it challenging for developers to forage through these sites to find the right repository or project. To understand the foraging behavior of developers, we conducted a gender-balanced (6 men and 6 women) think-aloud lab study. The participants completed the tasks of finding a repository and finding a bug within a project. We analyzed the participants’ foraging behavior using Information Foraging Theory. Our results revealed the cues and strategies used by both men and women developers. The results have implications to improve gender-inclusivity in code hosting sites.