CAREER: Empowering Software Engineering with Eye Tracking

本研究项目的目标是通过使用眼动仪对大型软件系统进行实证研究来提高对开发人员活动的认识。大多数在软件工程中进行的眼动跟踪研究都使用软件工件的小片段，例如以图像或文本显示的源代码。由于软件工件长达数百行，使用各种软件工件进行实际研究是不切实际的。为了解决这个问题，这项研究将开发一个强大的基础设施，使隐式眼动跟踪的工作环境中的开发人员，从而支持固有的滚动大文件和自动链接的眼睛凝视的工件元素看。该基础设施将推动在软件工程中进行眼动跟踪研究的最新技术水平。拟议的研究将导致发明，评估和应用创新的方法和工具，这些方法和工具使用开发人员的眼睛凝视来支持开发人员进行软件工程任务，如代码总结，代码推荐和软件可追溯性。横切这三个主要方向的其他活动与使用眼动跟踪作为基准和标准化视觉努力度量有关。这项工作的更广泛影响包括开发教育课程内容，增加对代表性不足的本科生群体的指导，开发开源软件，制作大型眼动跟踪数据集，以及与行业合作评估和验证拟议的研究。教育活动还包括一个强大的K-12推广计划，以鼓励学生追求计算机职业。

The objective of this research project is to advance knowledge of developer activity by conducting empirical studies on large software systems using an eye tracker. Most eye tracking studies done in software engineering use small snippets of software artifacts such as source code that are shown as images or text. With software artifacts being hundreds of lines long, doing realistic studies using a variety of software artifacts is not practical. To address this problem, this research will develop a robust infrastructure that enables implicit eye tracking within the working environment of the developer thereby supporting inherent scrolling on large files and automating the linking of eye gaze to artifact elements looked at. This infrastructure will advance the state of the art in conducting eye tracking studies in software engineering.The proposed research will lead to inventing, evaluating, and applying innovative methods and tools that use developer eye gaze to support the developer in software engineering tasks such as code summarization, code recommendations, and software traceability. Additional activities that crosscut these three main directions are related to using eye tracking as a benchmark and standardizing visual effort metrics. The broader impacts of this work include developing educational course content, increased mentoring of underrepresented undergraduate student groups, developing open source software, producing large eye tracking datasets, and collaborating with industry for assessment and validation of the proposed research. Educational activities also include a strong K-12 outreach program to encourage students to pursue a career in computing.