iTrace: enabling eye tracking on software artifacts within the IDE to support software engineering tasks

Shaffer, Tim; Wise, Jenna; Walters, Braden; Müller, Sebastian; Falcone, Michael; Sharif, Bonita

doi:10.1145/2786805.2803188

Cited by 57 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…For capturing eye-tracking data and linking it to source code elements in the IDE, we developed and use a new version of our Eclipse plugin iTrace [35]. For this new version, we added the ability to automatically and on-the-fly link eye gazes to fine-grained AST source code elements, including method calls, variable declarations and other statements in the Eclipse IDE.…”

Section: Itracementioning

confidence: 99%

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Tracing software developers' eyes and interactions for change tasks

Kevic

Walters

Shaffer

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering

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What are software developers doing during a change task? While an answer to this question opens countless opportunities to support developers in their work, only little is known about developers' detailed navigation behavior for realistic change tasks. Most empirical studies on developers performing change tasks are limited to very small code snippets or are limited by the granularity or the detail of the data collected for the study. In our research, we try to overcome these limitations by combining user interaction monitoring with very fine granular eye-tracking data that is automatically linked to the underlying source code entities in the IDE.In a study with 12 professional and 10 student developers working on three change tasks from an open source system, we used our approach to investigate the detailed navigation of developers for realistic change tasks. The results of our study show, amongst others, that the eye-tracking data does indeed capture different aspects than user interaction data and that developers focus on only small parts of methods that are often related by data flow. We discuss our findings and their implications for better developer tool support.

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Section: Itracementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since we conducted our study with the Eclipse IDE, we used the Eclipse plugin Mylyn [2, 20] to monitor user interactions. For the eye-tracking data, we used our new version of the Eclipse plugin iTrace [35].…”

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracing software developers' eyes and interactions for change tasks

Kevic

Walters

Shaffer

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…They were also told that they could navigate the codebase if they needed to. The entire study was conducted inside the Eclipse environment using the Eclipse plugin iTrace [18]. iTrace is able to collect eye tracking data of where a developer is looking and map it on the fly to source code elements looked at even in the presence of file scrolling and file switching.…”

Section: Taskmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A Tobii eye tracker (X60) was used to collect gaze data within the iTrace [18] environment. The eye tracker generates 60 raw gaze samples per second.…”

Section: Eye Tracking Apparatus and Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The eye gaze data are processed to identify whether the term looked at corresponds to a signature, call, or control flow term. Information from the eye-tracking tool, iTrace [18], includes information about the line number, the term name and the type of the term (method, variable, conditional statements, or other types). In some cases, the exact term that a participant looked at was not identified at the time of this experiment but the line number was.…”

Section: Pre-processing the Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Developer Reading Behavior While Summarizing Java Methods: Size and Context Matters

Abid

Sharif

Dragan

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)

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An eye-tracking study of 18 developers reading and summarizing Java methods is presented. The developers provide a written summary for methods assigned to them. In total, 63 methods are used from five different systems. Previous studies on this topic use only short methods presented in isolation usually as images. In contrast, this work presents the study in the Eclipse IDE allowing access to all the source code in the system. The developer can navigate via scrolling and switching files while writing the summary. New eye-tracking infrastructure allows for this improvement in the study environment. Data collected includes eye gazes on source code, written summaries, and time to complete each summary. Unlike prior work that concluded developers focus on the signature the most, these results indicate that they tend to focus on the method body more than the signature. Moreover, both experts and novices tend to revisit control flow terms rather than reading them for a long period. They also spend a significant amount of gaze time and have higher gaze visits when they read call terms. Experts tend to revisit the body of the method significantly more frequently than its signature as the size of the method increases. Moreover, experts tend to write their summaries from source code lines that they read the most.

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