Paper Info
Title
A practical guide on conducting eye tracking studies in software engineering
Abstract
For several years, the software engineering research community used eye trackers to study program comprehension, bug localization, pair programming, and other software engineering tasks. Eye trackers provide researchers with insights on software engineers' cognitive processes, data that can augment those acquired through other means, such as on-line surveys and questionnaires. While there are many ways to take advantage of eye trackers, advancing their use requires defining standards for experimental design, execution, and reporting. We begin by presenting the foundations of eye tracking to provide context and perspective. Based on previous surveys of eye tracking for programming and software engineering tasks and our collective, extensive experience with eye trackers, we discusswhenandwhyresearchers should use eye trackers as well ashowthey should use them. We compile a list of typical use cases-real and anticipated-of eye trackers, as well as metrics, visualizations, and statistical analyses to analyze and report eye-tracking data. We also discuss the pragmatics of eye tracking studies. Finally, we offer lessons learned about using eye trackers to study software engineering tasks. This paper is intended to be a one-stop resource for researchers interested in designing, executing, and reporting eye tracking studies of software engineering tasks.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1007/s10664-020-09829-4
EMPIRICAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Eye tracking,Practical guide,Empirical software engineering,Program comprehension
Journal
25.0
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
5.0
1382-3256
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.37
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zohreh Sharafi171.77
Bonita Sharif243727.18
Yann-Gael Gueheneuc32723141.93
Andrew Begel4115470.70
Roman Bednarik556148.77
Martha E. Crosby625543.06