  Software engineering is extremely information-intensive. Every day developers
work with source code, version repositories, issue trackers, documentation,
web-based and other information resources. However, three key aspects of
information work lack good support: (i) combining information from different
sources; (ii) flexibly presenting collected information to enable easier
comprehension; and (iii) automatically acting on collected information, for
example to perform a refactoring. Poor support for these activities makes many
common development tasks time-consuming and error-prone. We propose an approach
that directly addresses these three issues by integrating a flexible query
mechanism into the development environment. Our approach enables diverse ways
to process and visualize information and can be extended via scripts. We
demonstrate how an implementation of the approach can be used to rapidly write
queries that meet a wide range of information needs.
