Eye Movements in Code Reading: Relaxing the Linear Order

Busjahn, Teresa; Bednarik, Roman; Begel, Andrew; Crosby, Martha E.; Paterson, James H.; Schulte, Carsten; Sharif, Bonita; Tamm, Sascha

doi:10.1109/icpc.2015.36

Cited by 138 publications

(112 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Moreover, software engineering researchers repeatedly found huge variations in productivity even between programmers with the same level of experience [5][6][7] . Several previous studies showed the psychological characteristics of expert programmers in their behaviors 8,9 , knowledge structures [10][11][12] , and eye movements [13][14][15][16] . Although these studies clearly illustrate the behavioral specificity of expert programmers, it remains unclear what neural bases differentiate expert programmers from novices.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expert programmers have fine-tuned cortical representations of source code

Ikutani

Kubo

Nishida

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Expertise enables humans to achieve outstanding performance on domain-specific tasks, and programming is no exception. Many have shown that expert programmers exhibit remarkable differences from novices in behavioral performance, knowledge structure, and selective attention. However, the underlying differences in the brain are still unclear. We here address this issue by associating the cortical representation of source code with individual programming expertise using a data-driven decoding approach. This approach enabled us to identify seven brain regions, widely distributed in the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices, that have a tight relationship with programming expertise. In these brain regions, functional categories of source code could be decoded from brain activity and the decoding accuracies were significantly correlated with individual behavioral performances on source-code categorization. Our results suggest that programming expertise is built up on fine-tuned cortical representations specialized for the domain of programming.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expert programmers have fine-tuned cortical representations of source code

Ikutani

Kubo

Nishida

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…Another study [25] by the same group by authors extends the work and looks in the linearity of natural language text reading and how this linear order is not followed when reading source code. They look at both experts and novices and show that novices also exhibit a less linear order when they read source code compared to natural language text.…”

Section: Eye Tracking As Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 92%

The Use of Eye Tracking in Software Development

Sharif

Shaffer

2015

Foundations of Augmented Cognition

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Abstract. Eye trackers have been routinely used in psychology reading experiments and in website usability studies for many years. However, it is only recently that they have been used by more researchers in the software engineering community. In this paper, we categorize two broad areas in which eye tracking technology can benefit software development in a practical way. The first area includes using the eye tracker as an assessment tool for software artifacts, tools, and techniques. The second area deals with using eye tracking data from developers to inform certain software tools and software development tasks such as providing developer recommendations and software traceability tasks. Examples of experiments and studies done in each of these broad areas is presented and discussed along with future work. The results point towards many benefits that eye trackers provide to augment the daily lives of programmers during software development.

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“…Our a-posteriori repository mining approach assumes a top-to-bottom reading order of blocks and a left-toright reading order for individual lines. We know that developers "jump" in the code when reading a file, only focusing on what seems important to solve the task at hand (Busjahn et al 2015;Siegmund et al 2014). However, in order to understand small coherent logical units, such as micro-clones, developers must necessarily read in the control-flow-direction of the software -which is top-to-bottom, left-to-right.…”

Section: Internal Threatsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The last line effect explained

Beller

Zaidman

Karpov³

et al. 2016

Empir Software Eng

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Micro-clones are tiny duplicated pieces of code; they typically comprise only few statements or lines. In this paper, we study the "Last Line Effect," the phenomenon that the last line or statement in a micro-clone is much more likely to contain an error than the previous lines or statements. We do this by analyzing 219 open source projects and reporting on 263 faulty micro-clones and interviewing six authors of real-world faulty micro-clones. In an interdisciplinary collaboration, we examine the underlying psychological mechanisms for the presence of these relatively trivial errors. Based on the interviews and further technical analyses, we suggest that so-called "action slips" play a pivotal role for the existence of the last line effect: Developers' attention shifts away at the end of a micro-clone creation task due to noise and the routine nature of the task. Moreover, all micro-clones whose origin we could determine were introduced in unusually large commits. Practitioners benefit from this knowledge twofold: 1) They can spot situations in which they are likely to introduce a faulty micro-clone and 2) they can use PVS-Studio, our automated micro-clone detector, to help find erroneous micro-clones.

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Eye Movements in Code Reading: Relaxing the Linear Order

Cited by 138 publications

References 27 publications

Expert programmers have fine-tuned cortical representations of source code

Expert programmers have fine-tuned cortical representations of source code

The Use of Eye Tracking in Software Development

The last line effect explained

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