CI-New: Collaborative Research: An Infrastructure that Combines Eye Tracking into Integrated Development Environments to Study Software Development and Program Comprehension

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The software engineering research community is now using eye trackers to study how developers comprehend and develop software. Unfortunately, eye trackers have limited features and functionality, which need to be augmented to effectively study the behavior of software developers performing programming and contextual tasks. Eye tracking devices only allow scientists to study fixed, limited-size, stimuli (e.g., block of text or image). Studies normally require that the text fit on one screen (or page). There is very limited or no support to allow such things as scrolling through longer documents or switching back and forth between documents on a computer. While this is sufficient to study how people read one line of code or a sentence it is wholly inadequate to study how programmers attempt to comprehend or develop a large software system.The objective of the research is to address this limitation and drastically expand the types and size of stimuli that can be studied using an eye tracking device. In addition to supporting source code artifacts, it also supports artifacts such as stack overflow documents, bug reports, testing documents, and requirements. This enables software engineering researchers to conduct large-scale realistic eye-tracking studies seamlessly within a software development environment. This eye-tracking-enabled infrastructure for studying program comprehension has the potential to transform the way lab studies and field studies are designed and executed as it advances the state of the art in conducting eye tracking studies in software engineering. The infrastructure directly impacts society by paving the way to further improve IDEs to support the developer in various software engineering tasks through the various research projects it facilitates. The immediate impact is to facilitate controlled laboratory and field environments for a community of researchers. The research may lead to software development tools that incorporate eye-tracking as part of a more productive programming environment leading to higher quality software.