research-article

How programmers read regular code: a controlled experiment using eye tracking

Authors:

Dror G. FeitelsonAuthors Info & Claims

ICPC '15: Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Program Comprehension

Pages 244 - 254

Published: 16 May 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Regular code, which includes repetitions of the same basic pattern, has been shown to have an effect on code comprehension: a regular function can be just as easy to comprehend as an irregular one with the same functionality, despite being longer and including more control constructs. It has been speculated that this effect is due to leveraging the understanding of the first instances to ease the understanding of repeated instances of the pattern. To verify and quantify this effect, we use eye tracking to measure the time and effort spent reading and understanding regular code. The results are that time and effort invested in the initial code segments are indeed much larger than those spent on the later ones, and the decay in effort can be modeled by an exponential or cubic model. This shows that syntactic code complexity metrics (such as LOC and MCC) need to be made context-sensitive, e.g. by giving reduced weight to repeated segments according to their place in the sequence.

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Cited By

Konopka MTalian ATvarozek JNavrat PBednarik RSchulte C(2018)Data flow metrics in program comprehension tasksProceedings of the Workshop on Eye Movements in Programming10.1145/3216723.3216728(1-6)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3216723.3216728
Beelders Tdu Plessis J(2016)The Influence of Syntax Highlighting on Scanning and Reading Behaviour for Source CodeProceedings of the Annual Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists10.1145/2987491.2987536(1-10)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2987491.2987536

Index Terms

How programmers read regular code: a controlled experiment using eye tracking
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Computer vision
      1. Computer vision problems
        Tracking
      2. Computer vision tasks
        Scene understanding
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICPC '15: Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Program Comprehension

May 2015

325 pages

General Chair:
Andrea De Lucia
University of Salerno, Italy
,
Program Chairs:
Christian Bird
Microsoft Research
,
Rocco Oliveto
University of Molise, Italy

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
IEEE-CS\DATC: IEEE Computer Society
TCSE: IEEE Computer Society's Tech. Council on Software Engin.

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IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 16 May 2015

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SIGSOFT
IEEE-CS\DATC
TCSE

ICSE '15: 37th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 16 - 24, 2015

Florence, Italy

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Cited By

Konopka MTalian ATvarozek JNavrat PBednarik RSchulte C(2018)Data flow metrics in program comprehension tasksProceedings of the Workshop on Eye Movements in Programming10.1145/3216723.3216728(1-6)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3216723.3216728
Beelders Tdu Plessis J(2016)The Influence of Syntax Highlighting on Scanning and Reading Behaviour for Source CodeProceedings of the Annual Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists10.1145/2987491.2987536(1-10)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2987491.2987536

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