What information do software engineering practitioners need?

This position paper addresses an important question for the discipline of Empirical or Evidence-based Software Engineering (SE), namely ´what information do software engineering practitioners need from the empirical studies´. The paper contributes to answering this question by presenting survey results on two sub-questions: 1) what are the topics that interest practitioners? and 2) what type of information is needed by practitioners? Answering the first question results in a set of SE topics, while the conclusion for the second question is that no specific preferences are found. The survey results also show that it is not possible to identify the ultimate information needs for the SE practitioner. Instead, different kinds of SE professionals exist, who have different needs. Identifying these groups via user profiles should be the direction for further research.