Recognizing eye tracking traits for source code review

Source code review is a core activity in software engineering where a reviewer examines the code with the intention of finding bugs in the program. A lot of research has been carried out in understanding how software engineers perform code comprehension; however contribution of eye tracking traits seems to have not been addressed. This paper outlines a study conducted in an industrial environment of software engineers. It focused on understanding the visual attention of subjects with programming skills and subjects without programming skills and recognize the eye tracking traits required for source code review. The results indicate a significant difference in gaze behaviors of these groups. The key aspects of subjects with programming skills while source code review are required to have certain eye tracking traits like better code coverage, attention span on error lines and comments.

[1]  Sebastiaan Mathôt,et al.  PyGaze: An open-source, cross-platform toolbox for minimal-effort programming of eyetracking experiments , 2014, Behavior research methods.

[2]  Markku Tukiainen,et al.  Analysing and Interpreting Quantitative Eye-Tracking Data in Studies of Programming: Phases of Debugging with Multiple Representations , 2007, PPIG.

[3]  N. Hari Narayanan,et al.  Visual attention patterns during program debugging with an IDE , 2012, ETRA '12.

[4]  Andrew Begel,et al.  Using psycho-physiological measures to assess task difficulty in software development , 2014, ICSE.

[5]  Hans Gruber,et al.  Eye Tracking Metrics in Software Engineering , 2018, ECSEE.

[6]  Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc,et al.  A systematic literature review on the usage of eye-tracking in software engineering , 2015, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[7]  Jiafu Wan,et al.  Implementing Smart Factory of Industrie 4.0: An Outlook , 2016, Int. J. Distributed Sens. Networks.

[8]  Andreas Busjahn,et al.  Analysis of code reading to gain more insight in program comprehension , 2011, Koli Calling.

[9]  Akito Monden,et al.  Analyzing individual performance of source code review using reviewers' eye movement , 2006, ETRA.

[10]  Jean Scholtz,et al.  The Roles Beacons Play in Comprehension for Novice and Expert Programmers , 2002, PPIG.

[11]  Bonita Sharif,et al.  An eye-tracking study assessing the comprehension of c++ and Python source code , 2014, ETRA.

[12]  Dawn J. Lawrie,et al.  The impact of identifier style on effort and comprehension , 2012, Empirical Software Engineering.

[13]  Jonathan I. Maletic,et al.  An eye-tracking study on the role of scan time in finding source code defects , 2012, ETRA.