What Developer Gaze Can Tell Us About Readable Code

Abstract: Tracking developer eye movements unobstrusively while they work on software tasks can give us insights into the thought processes that go into solving them. Eye movements are essential to cognitive processes because they focus a developer’s gaze on parts of source code that is processed by the brain. In this talk, I will highlight how eye tracking has been used to gauge visual effort in readability studies and my vision on how it can be used in future software engineering studies to learn about readable code.

Biography: Bonita Sharif, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska USA. She received her Ph.D. in 2010 and MS in 2003 in Computer Science from Kent State University, U.S.A and B.S. in Computer Science from Cyprus College, Nicosia Cyprus. Her research interests are in eye tracking related to software engineering, empirical software engineering, program comprehension, emotional awareness, software traceability, and software visualization to support maintenance of large systems. She serves as the Steering Committee chair for the ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications. Sharif also reviews for several major conferences and journals in software engineering and eye tracking. Sharif is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award and the NSF CRI award related to empowering software engineering with eye tracking. She directs the Software Engineering Research and Empirical Studies Lab at UNL. Her vision is to continue enhancing eye tracking infrastructure that supports and is accessible to developers, researchers, and educators so everyone can become more aware of how they work in practice thereby improving their productivity.