SING UP ITRACE CODE
In order to promote the development and use of sound experimental methodology, we discuss both considerations which need to be applied and potential problems that might occur, with regard to the experimental subjects, the code they work on, the tasks they are asked to perform, and the metrics for their performance. In addition, myriad different factors can influence the outcome, and seemingly small nuances may be detrimental to the study’s validity. But it is hard to conduct controlled experiments with human developers, and we also need to find a way to operationalize what “comprehension” actually means. The prevailing approach for such studies is to use controlled experiments, where the difference between treatments sheds light on factors which affect comprehension. As a result, studying code comprehension is also hard. Understanding program code is a complicated endeavor. Our tool helped to analyze the difference between the strategic program comprehension of programmers based on their demographic background, time taken to complete the task, choice of programming task, and expertise. We illustrate the usefulness of our tool by applying it to the eye movements of 216 programmers of multiple expertise levels that were collected during two code comprehension tasks. The tool supports interaction techniques like filter functions, aggregations, data sampling, and many more. It can be inspected in combination with overlaid scanpaths in which the saccades can be visually encoded in several forms, including straight, curved, and orthogonal lines, modifiable by interaction techniques. The source code is shown as a visual stimulus. Hence the focus of this work is on code and program comprehension. This paper proposes an open source visual analytics tool consisting of several views and perspectives on eye movement data collected during code reading tasks when writing computer programs.
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