A Gaze-Based Exploratory Study on the Information Seeking Behavior of Developers on Stack Overflow

Software developers use Stack Overflow on a daily basis to search for solutions to problems they encounter during bug fixing and feature enhancement. In prior work, studies have been done on mining Stack Overflow data such as for predicting unanswered questions or how and why people post. However, no work exists on how developers actually use, or more importantly, read the information presented to them on Stack Overflow. To better understand this behavior, we conduct an eye tracking study on how developers seek for information on Stack Overflow while tasked with creating human-readable summaries of methods and classes in large Java projects. Eye gaze data is collected on both the source code elements and Stack Overflow document elements at a fine token-level granularity using iTrace, our eye tracking infrastructure. We found that developers look at the text more often than the title in posts. Code snippets were the second most looked at element. Tags and votes are rarely looked at. When switching between Stack Overflow and the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE), developers often looked at method signatures and then switched to code and text elements on Stack Overflow. Such heuristics provide insight to automated code summarization tools as they decide what to give more weight to while generating summaries.