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Contribution Details

Type Journal Article
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Eye gaze and interaction contexts for change tasks – Observations and potential
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Katja Kevic
  • B M Walters
  • T R Shaffer
  • Bonita Sharif
  • D C Shepherd
  • Thomas Fritz
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Journal Title The Journal of Systems and Software
Publisher Elsevier
Geographical Reach international
ISSN 0164-1212
Volume 128
Page Range 252 - 266
Date 2017
Abstract Text The more we know about software developers’ detailed navigation behavior for change tasks, the better we are able to provide effective tool support. Currently, most empirical studies on developers performing change tasks are, however, limited to very small code snippets or limited by the granularity and detail of the data collected on developer’s navigation behavior. In our research, we extend this work by combining user interaction monitoring to gather interaction context – the code elements a developer selects and edits – with eye-tracking to gather more detailed and fine-granular gaze context-code elements a developer looked at. In a study with 12 professional and 10 student developers we gathered interaction and gaze contexts from participants working on three change tasks of an open source system. Based on an analysis of the data we found, amongst other results, that gaze context captures different aspects than interaction context and that developers only read small portions of code elements. We further explore the potential of the more detailed and fine-granular data by examining the use of the captured change task context to predict perceived task difficulty and to provide better and more fine-grained navigation recommendations. We discuss our findings and their implications for better tool support.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1016/j.jss.2016.03.030
Other Identification Number merlin-id:13314
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Keywords Hardware and Architecture, Software, Information Systems