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

Peterson, Cole S.; Saddler, Jonathan A.; Halavick, Natalie M.; Sharif, Bonita

doi:10.1145/3290607.3312801

Cited by 15 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…DISCUSSION We saw participants predominately utilizing textual and code cue and sporadically using other available cues. These results were similar to the Peterson et al [24] eye-tracking study. This suggests that SO can add code indicators along with question description while returning lists of posts with its native search engine.…”

Section: Expertise Differencessupporting

confidence: 91%

Developers’ Foraging Behavior on Stack Overflow

Diwanji

Sedhain

Bodi

et al. 2022

2022 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

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Stack Overflow is the most popular platform for developers to exchange knowledge on software engineering tasks. Developers spend large portions of their time trying to find relevant questions and answers. However, Stack Overflow contains tremendous amounts of noisy and redundant questions and answers. This becomes costly in terms of time as well as cognitive load on developers. To understand information-seeking behavior, we used Information Foraging Theory (IFT). We conducted a gender-balanced, think-aloud study with 12 participants (6 students and 6 professionals) where they completed a debugging task. We investigated the cues associated with participants' actions through the lens of IFT.

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Section: Expertise Differencessupporting

confidence: 91%

Developers’ Foraging Behavior on Stack Overflow

Diwanji

Sedhain

Bodi

et al. 2022

2022 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Several studies have tried to investigate users' information searching behavior, yet few of them focus on the search for online technical documents. Existing studies mainly focus on general help information search on the web (H. Li et al, 2013;Josyula et al, 2018;Xia et al, 2017) and search behavior within specific information platforms such as Stack Overflow (Peterson et al, 2019). Our previous research explored how developers search for documents in an online help center, but Online technical documents are displayed on the website, so the evaluation of external findability can refer to the evaluation method for how difficult a website can be found.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Technical communication in China : studies on the user experience of technical documentation

Gao

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Conducting global technical communication requires strong language and communication skills, especially in English and other widely spoken languages.According to our findings, 62% of participants employed two or more languages in their daily work. English, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish are the most used foreign languages. 38% engaged in only one language, either Chinese or English. Geographic locationParticipants' workplaces were distributed in 13 provinces and municipalities (or 20 cities) of China's 34 provincial-level administrative regions. Two thirds of technical communicators lived in three cities: Beijing (26%), Shanghai (25%), and Shenzhen (15%). 90% of participants worked in China's eastern and southern coastal region, which is the most economically developed area in comparison to the country's central, western, and northeast regions. All 20 cities are municipalities, provincial capitals, or other big cities with thriving economies, diverse workforces, and high wages. Professional experience and work practiceWe studied participants' past and present practices of technical communication in the following aspects. Previous professionHalf of the participants (54%) began working in this field soon after graduating from college or graduate school. In other words, technical communicators were half of practitioners' first jobs. Among people who switched to technical communication from another field, we see a strong connection between their prior and current jobs. Engineers and translators ranked second (19%) and third (15%), respectively, as the most likely previous jobs. Other previous jobs include management and marketing specialists, product trainers, editors, consultants, English teachers, etc. It shows that most people's previous professions required dealing with various aspects of enterprise products or services, such as design, management, training, and document translation and editing, making the transition to technical communication easy.

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Deja Vu: semantics-aware recording and replay of high-speed eye tracking and interaction data to support cognitive studies of software engineering tasks—methodology and analyses

et al. 2022

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The paper introduces a fundamental technological problem with collecting high-speed eye tracking data while studying software engineering tasks in an integrated development environment. The use of eye trackers is quickly becoming an important means to study software developers and how they comprehend source code and locate bugs. High quality eye trackers can record upwards of 120 to 300 gaze points per second. However, it is not always possible to map each of these points to a line and column position in a source code file (in the presence of scrolling and file switching) in real time at data rates over 60 gaze points per second without data loss. Unfortunately, higher data rates are more desirable as they allow for finer granularity and more accurate study analyses. To alleviate this technological problem, a novel method for eye tracking data collection is presented. Instead of performing gaze analysis in real time, all telemetry (keystrokes, mouse movements, and eye tracker output) data during a study is recorded as it happens. Sessions are then replayed at a much slower speed allowing for ample time to map gaze point positions to the appropriate file, line, and column to perform additional analysis. A description of the method and corresponding tool, Deja Vu, is presented. An evaluation of the method and tool is conducted using three different eye trackers running at four different speeds (60 Hz, 120 Hz, 150 Hz, and 300 Hz). This timing evaluation is performed in Visual Studio, Eclipse, and Atom IDEs. Results show that Deja Vu can playback 100% of the data recordings, correctly mapping the gaze to corresponding elements, making it a well-founded and suitable post processing step for future eye tracking studies in software engineering. Finally, a proof of concept replication analysis of four tasks from two previous studies is performed. Due to using the Deja Vu approach, this replication resulted in richer collected data and improved on the number of distinct syntactic categories that gaze was mapped on in the code.

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

Cited by 15 publications

References 6 publications

Developers’ Foraging Behavior on Stack Overflow

Developers’ Foraging Behavior on Stack Overflow

Technical communication in China : studies on the user experience of technical documentation

Deja Vu: semantics-aware recording and replay of high-speed eye tracking and interaction data to support cognitive studies of software engineering tasks—methodology and analyses

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