Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
10.1145/3314111.3322876acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesetraConference Proceedingsconference-collections
abstract

Looks can mean achieving: understanding eye gaze patterns of proficiency in code comprehension

Published: 25 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

The research proposes four hypotheses that focus on deriving helpful insights from eye patterns, including hidden truths concerning programmer expertise, task context and difficulty. We present results from a study performed in a classroom setting with 17 students, in which we found that novice programmers visit output statements and declarations the same amount as the rest of the program they are presented other than control flow block headers.
This research builds upon insightful findings from our previous work, wherein we focus on gathering statistical eye-gaze effects between categories of various populations to drive the pursuit of new research. Ongoing and future work entails using the iTrace infrastructure to capture gaze as participants scroll to read code pages extending longer than what can fit on one screen. The focus will be on building various models that relate eye gaze to comprehension via methods that realistically capture activity in a development environment.

References

[1]
Nahla J. Abid, Bonita Sharif, Natalia Dragan, Hend Alrasheed, and Jonathan I. Maletic. 2019. Developer Reading Behavior while Summarizing Java Methods: Size and Context Matters. In Proceedings of the 41th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2019). ACM, New York, NY, USA, To Appear.
[2]
Laura Beckwith, Margaret Burnett, Susan Wiedenbeck, Curtis Cook, Shraddha Sorte, and Michelle Hastings. 2005. Effectiveness of End-user Debugging Software Features: Are There Gender Issues?. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2005) (CHI '05). ACM, Portland, Oregon, USA, 869--878.
[3]
Ruven E.Brooks. 1983. Towards a Theory of the Comprehension of Computer Programs. Intl J. of Man-Machine Studies 18, 6 (1983), 543--554. http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/journals/ijmms/ijmms18.html#Brooks83
[4]
Margaret Burnett, Curtis Cook, and Gregg Rothermel. 2004. End-user software engineering. Commun. ACM 47, 9 (2004), 53.
[5]
Margaret M. Burnett and Brad A. Myers. 2014. Future ofend-user software engineering: beyond the silos. In Proceedings of the on Future of Software Engineering - FOSE 2014 (2014). ACM Press, Hyderabad, India, 201--211.
[6]
Brian de Alwis and Gail C. Murphy. 2008. Answering Conceptual Queries with Ferret. In Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering (2008) (ICSE '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 21--30. :.
[7]
Drew T. Guarnera, Corey A. Bryant, Ashwin Mishra, Jonathan I. Maletic, and Bonita Sharif. 2018. iTrace: Eye Tracking Infrastructure for Development Environments. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 105, 3 pages.
[8]
Kerry Hart and Anita Sarma. 2014. Perceptions of answer quality in an online technical question and answer forum. In Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering - CHASE 2014 (2014). ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 103--106.
[9]
Katja Kevic, Braden M. Walters, Timothy R. Shaffer, Bonita Sharif, David C. Shepherd, and Thomas Fritz. 2015. Tracing software developers' eyes and interactions for change tasks. In Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meetingon Foundations of Software Engineering - ESEC/FSE 2015. ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 202--213.
[10]
Thomas D. LaToza, Gina Venolia, and Robert DeLine. 2006. Maintaining Mental Models: A Study of Developer Work Habits. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering (2006) (ICSE '06). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 492--501.
[11]
Stanley Letovsky. 1987. Cognitive processes in program comprehension. Journal of Systems and software 7, 4 (1987), 325--339.
[12]
Cole S. Peterson, Natalie M. Halavick, Jonathan A. Saddler, and Bonita Sharif. 2019a. A Gaze-Based Exploratory Study on the Information Seeking Behavior of Developers on Stack Overflow. In CHI '19 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2019-05-04) (CHI EA '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, to appear.
[13]
Cole S. Peterson, Jonathan Saddler, Tanja Blascheck, and Bonita Sharif. 2019b. Visually Analyzing Students' Gaze on C++ Code Snippets. In Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Eye Movements in Programming (2019-05-27) (EMIP '19). IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, to appear.
[14]
Jonathan Saddler, Cole Peterson, Patrick Peachock, and Bonita Sharif. 2019. Reading Behavior and Comprehension of C++ Source Code - A Classroom Study. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Human Computer Interaction (2019-07-26) (HCII '19). Springer, to appear.
[15]
Zohreh Sharafi, Timothy Shaffer, Bonita Sharif, and Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc. 2015. Eye-Tracking Metrics in Software Engineering. In 2015 Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, APSEC 2015, New Delhi, India, December 1-4, 2015. 96--103.
[16]
Bonita Sharif, Timothy Shaffer, Jenna Wise, and Jonathan I. Maletic. 2016. Tracking Developers' Eyes in the IDE. 33, 3 (2016), 105--108.
[17]
Jonathan Sillito, Gail C. Murphy, and Kris De Volder. 2008. Asking and Answering Questions during a Programming Change Task. 34, 4 (2008), 434--451.
[18]
Anneliese Von Mayrhauser and A Marie Vans. 1995. Program comprehension during software maintenance and evolution. Computer 8 (1995), 44--55.
[19]
Anneliese von Mayrhauser and A Marie Vans. 1997. Program understanding behavior during debugging of large scale software. In Papers presented at the seventh workshop on Empirical studies of programmers. ACM, 157--179.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)On Eye Tracking in Software EngineeringSN Computer Science10.1007/s42979-024-03045-35:6Online publication date: 26-Jul-2024
  • (2020)Eye-tracking Based Performance Analysis in Error Finding Programming Test2020 15th International Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE)10.1109/ICCSE49874.2020.9201882(477-482)Online publication date: Aug-2020

Index Terms

  1. Looks can mean achieving: understanding eye gaze patterns of proficiency in code comprehension

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    ETRA '19: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications
    June 2019
    623 pages
    ISBN:9781450367097
    DOI:10.1145/3314111
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 25 June 2019

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. developer expertise
    2. eye tracking
    3. program comprehension
    4. task proficiency

    Qualifiers

    • Abstract

    Conference

    ETRA '19

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 69 of 137 submissions, 50%

    Upcoming Conference

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)5
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
    Reflects downloads up to 03 Jan 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)On Eye Tracking in Software EngineeringSN Computer Science10.1007/s42979-024-03045-35:6Online publication date: 26-Jul-2024
    • (2020)Eye-tracking Based Performance Analysis in Error Finding Programming Test2020 15th International Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE)10.1109/ICCSE49874.2020.9201882(477-482)Online publication date: Aug-2020

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media