This paper proposes to use eye movements to characterize the performance of individuals in reviewing source code of computer programs. We first present an integrated environment to measure and record the eye movements of the code reviewers. Based on the fixation data, the environment computes the line number of the source code that the reviewer is currently looking at. The environment can also record and play back how the eyes moved during the review process. We conducted an experiment to analyze 30 review processes (6 programs, 5 subjects) using the environment. As a result, we have identified a particular pattern, called scan, in the subjects' eye movements. Quantitative analysis showed that reviewers who did not spend enough time for the scan tend to take more time for finding defects.

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Program comprehension is a fundamental activity in software development that cannot be easily measured, as it is performed inside the human brain. Using a wearable Near Infra-red Spectroscopy (NIRS) device to measure cerebral blood flow, this paper tries to answer the question: Can the measurement of brain blood-flow quantify programmers' mental workload during program comprehension activities? We performed a controlled experiment with 10 subjects; 8 of them showed high cerebral blood flow while understanding strongly obfuscated programs (requiring high mental workload). This suggests the possibility of using NIRS to measure the mental workload of a person during software development activities.

Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) has been used as a low cost, noninvasive method to measure brain activity. In this paper, we experiment to measure the effects of variables and controls in a source code to the brain activity in program comprehension. The measurement results are evaluated after noise reduction and normalization to statistical analysis. As the result of the experiment, significant differences in brain activity were observed at a task that requires memorizing variables to understand a code snippet. On the other hand, no significant differences between different levels of mental arithmetic tasks were observed. We conclude that the frontal pole reflects workload to short-term memory caused by variables without affected from calculation.

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