Paper Info
Title
Quantifying programmers' mental workload during program comprehension based on cerebral blood flow measurement: a controlled experiment
Abstract
Program comprehension is a fundamental activity in software development that cannot be easily measured, as it is performed inside the human brain. Using a wearable Near Infra-red Spectroscopy (NIRS) device to measure cerebral blood flow, this paper tries to answer the question: Can the measurement of brain blood-flow quantify programmers' mental workload during program comprehension activities? We performed a controlled experiment with 10 subjects; 8 of them showed high cerebral blood flow while understanding strongly obfuscated programs (requiring high mental workload). This suggests the possibility of using NIRS to measure the mental workload of a person during software development activities.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1145/2591062.2591098
ICSE Companion
Keywords
Field
DocType
mental workload,cerebral blood flow measurement,measurement,program comprehension,testing and debugging,distribution, maintenance, and enhancement
Workload,Computer science,Wearable computer,Real-time computing,Software,Cerebral blood flow,Controlled experiment,Obfuscation,Program comprehension,Software development
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
17
0.87
2
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Takao Nakagawa1170.87
Yasutaka Kamei291050.52
Hidetake Uwano310211.57
Akito Monden459155.03
Ken-ichi Matsumoto51396131.56
Daniel M. Germán662537.22