Customized awareness: recommending relevant external change events

It is often assumed that developers´ view of their system and its environment is always consistent with everyone else´s; in practice, this assumption can be false, as the developer has little practical control over changes to the environments in which their code will be deployed. To proactively respond to such situations, developers must constantly monitor a flood of information involving changes to the deployment environments; unfortunately, the vast majority of this information is irrelevant to the individual developer, and its sheer volume makes it likely that infrequent change events of relevance are overlooked. As a result, errors may arise at deployment time that the developer does not immediately detect. This paper presents a recommendation approach for filtering the flood of change events on deployment dependencies to those that are most likely to cause problems for the individual developer. The approach is evaluated for its ability to drastically filter irrelevant details, while being unlikely to filter important ones. The relevance of the results is assessed on the basis of deployment problems that would have historically occurred within a set of industrial systems.