What are software developers doing during a change task? While an answer to this question opens countless opportunities to support developers in their work, only little is known about developers' detailed navigation behavior for realistic change tasks. Most empirical studies on developers performing change tasks are limited to very small code snippets or are limited by the granularity or the detail of the data collected for the study. In our research, we try to overcome these limitations by combining user interaction monitoring with very fine granular eye-tracking data that is automatically linked to the underlying source code entities in the IDE. In a study with 12 professional and 10 student developers working on three change tasks from an open source system, we used our approach to investigate the detailed navigation of developers for realistic change tasks. The results of our study show, amongst others, that the eye tracking data does indeed capture different aspects than user interaction data and that developers focus on only small parts of methods that are often related by data flow. We discuss our findings and their implications for better developer tool support.

The paper presents iTrace, an Eclipse plugin that implicitly records developers' eye movements while they work on change tasks. iTrace is the first eye tracking environment that makes it possible for researchers to conduct eye tracking studies on large software systems. An overview of the design and architecture is presented along with features and usage scenarios. iTrace is designed to support a variety of eye trackers. The design is flexible enough to record eye movements on various types of software artifacts (Java code, text/html/xml documents, diagrams), as well as IDE user interface elements. The plugin has been successfully used for software traceability tasks and program comprehension tasks. iTrace is also applicable to other tasks such as code summarization and code recommendations based on developer eye movements. A short video demonstration is available at https://youtu.be/3OUnLCX4dXo.

The paper presents a novel approach for recovering software traceability links from developers' eye gazes. An eye tracker is used to capture eye gazes while developers perform software maintenance tasks within the Eclipse IDE. An algorithm is presented that establishes a set of traceability links from the eye-gaze data of several developer sessions. A preliminary study assesses the feasibility and validity of the approach. The links generated by the approach were validated by another set of developers. Results indicate that our algorithm achieves strong recall when developers accurately perform bug-localization tasks.