Martin P. Robillard, Robert J. Walker
Software engineering is a knowledge-intensive activity that presents many information navigation challenges. Information spaces in software engineering include the source code and change history of the software, discussion lists and forums, issue databases, component technologies and their learning resources, and the development environment. The technical nature, size, and dynamicity of these information spaces motivate the development of a special class of applications to support developers: recommendation systems in software engineering (RSSEs), which are software applications that provide information items estimated to be valuable for a software engineering task in a given context. In this introduction, we review the characteristics of information spaces in software engineering, describe the unique aspects of RSSEs, present an overview of the issues and considerations involved in creating, evaluating, and using RSSEs, and present a general outlook on the current state of research and development in the field of recommendation systems for highly technical domains.