EYE MOVEMENTS IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - WHAT DIFFERS THE EXPERT FROM THE NOVICE?

This study is a replica of Uwano, Nakamura, Monden and Matsumoto from the year 2006 [1]. Its main intention is to survey the described eye movement patterns which were described by Uwano et al. and harness them for the teaching and learning of software engineering. Furthermore, it should be surveyed, if there are any experience-related changes in the eye movements of the participants while they are reviewing a piece of source code. For this purpose, an eye tracking study is designed which contains six erroneous C-codes. A sample of 25 programmers (18 novices and 7 advanced) is recruited for this experiment. The recorded eye tracking data is supplemented by interviews and questionnaires, which give insight to the personal backgrounds of the participants and the cognitive strategies involved in code reviewing. Due to the rather small sample size and the ongoing data collection, the results do not show statistical significant data, but they still proof experience-related differences between both groups. The advanced subjects are reviewing the code in a more elegant and efficient way as the novices and have a higher error detection.