A Gaze-Based Exploratory Study on the Information Seeking Behavior of Developers on Stack Overflow
A Gaze-Based Exploratory Study on the Information Seeking Behavior of Developers on Stack Overflow
复制标题
基于凝视的 Stack Overflow 上开发者信息查找行为探索性研究
DOI：
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发表时间：
2019
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Bonita Sharif
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Cole S. Peterson;Jonathan A. Saddler;Natalie M. Halavick;Bonita Sharif
软件开发人员每天都使用Stack Overflow来搜索他们在bug修复和功能增强过程中遇到的问题的解决方案。在之前的工作中，已经对挖掘Stack Overflow数据进行了研究，例如预测未回答的问题或人们如何以及为什么发布。然而，没有关于开发人员如何实际使用，或者更重要的是，阅读Stack Overflow上提供给他们的信息的工作。为了更好地理解这种行为，我们进行了一项眼动追踪研究，研究开发人员在大型Java项目中创建人类可读的方法和类摘要时如何寻找Stack Overflow信息。使用我们的眼动跟踪基础设施iTrace，以精细的令牌级粒度在源代码元素和Stack Overflow文档元素上收集眼动数据。我们发现，开发人员在帖子中查看文本的频率高于标题。代码段是第二个最受关注的元素。标签和投票很少被关注。当在Stack Overflow和Eclipse集成开发环境（IDE）之间切换时，开发人员通常会查看方法签名，然后切换到Stack Overflow上的代码和文本元素。这样的分析为自动化代码摘要工具提供了洞察力，因为它们决定在生成摘要时给予哪些更大的权重。
Software developers use Stack Overflow on a daily basis to search for solutions to problems they encounter during bug fixing and feature enhancement. In prior work, studies have been done on mining Stack Overflow data such as for predicting unanswered questions or how and why people post. However, no work exists on how developers actually use, or more importantly, read the information presented to them on Stack Overflow. To better understand this behavior, we conduct an eye tracking study on how developers seek for information on Stack Overflow while tasked with creating human-readable summaries of methods and classes in large Java projects. Eye gaze data is collected on both the source code elements and Stack Overflow document elements at a fine token-level granularity using iTrace, our eye tracking infrastructure. We found that developers look at the text more often than the title in posts. Code snippets were the second most looked at element. Tags and votes are rarely looked at. When switching between Stack Overflow and the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE), developers often looked at method signatures and then switched to code and text elements on Stack Overflow. Such heuristics provide insight to automated code summarization tools as they decide what to give more weight to while generating summaries.