News

How does the Q and A work?

Written on 04.12.24 by Annabelle Bergum

We were unsure if everybody is aware how our Q and A system works. So here is a short reminder:

If you and your advisor feel that you want to discuss questions with me (Annabelle Bergum) or Anna-Maria Maurer on a technical level in the Q and A, then please write us an email.

In this email you… Read more

We were unsure if everybody is aware how our Q and A system works. So here is a short reminder:

If you and your advisor feel that you want to discuss questions with me (Annabelle Bergum) or Anna-Maria Maurer on a technical level in the Q and A, then please write us an email.

In this email you should include your advisor in the CC, as well as the specific discussion points, so that we can prepare accordingly.

This email must be sent no later than Tuesday 12:15 (48 hours before the Q and A session), as we plan the sessions.

Have a good week,
Annabelle

How to conduct a literature search

Written on 22.11.24 by Marvin Wyrich

Hello everybody,

I have been told that some of you are already eagerly waiting for the talk on how to find and access suitable literature. I don't want to keep you waiting any longer and have uploaded the talk to YouTube, where you can watch it at your own pace and listen to it again at any time… Read more

Hello everybody,

I have been told that some of you are already eagerly waiting for the talk on how to find and access suitable literature. I don't want to keep you waiting any longer and have uploaded the talk to YouTube, where you can watch it at your own pace and listen to it again at any time during the semester. Note that

  • this also means that the next session on Thursday will be shorter to compensate for the viewing time;
  • you are welcome to send questions about the content to wyrich@cs.uni-saarland.de or your supervisor from now on. We may also publish a list of frequently asked questions together with their answers.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQkZrvFZ_lY
Slides: Materials > How To Literature Search

Best regards,
Marvin Wyrich

LSF Important Information

Written on 21.11.24 by Annabelle Bergum

Hello,

I was informed by one of you that the LSF will be down from 22.11-28.11, which means, that you should register today.

If you have any problems, please e-mail us.

Kind Regards
Annabelle

Demographic Data in the data sets

Written on 07.11.24 by Annabelle Bergum

Hello everybody,

these are the categories our questionnaires covered:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Handedness
  • Job/Profession
  • Years of Work
  • Years of Programming (learning)
  • Years of Professional Programming
  • (Years of Programming with Java)
  • Experience in logical, functional, imperative, objective… Read more

Hello everybody,

these are the categories our questionnaires covered:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Handedness
  • Job/Profession
  • Years of Work
  • Years of Programming (learning)
  • Years of Professional Programming
  • (Years of Programming with Java)
  • Experience in logical, functional, imperative, objective programming
  • Expertise compared to other students/professionals

The questionnaires will be uploaded soon.
Kind Regards
Annabelle

First Session

Written on 04.11.24 by Annabelle Bergum

Hello everybody,

Reminder: We will meet on Thursday at 12:15-14:00 Seminar Room 2.06 E1.1 for the kick-off meeting.

The attendance is mandatory!

Best regards,
Annabelle

The Eye of the Beholder: What Can Eye-Tracking Data Reveal about Code?

by Sven Apel, Norman Peitek, Marvin Wyrich, Annabelle Bergum, Tobias Dick, Christian Hechtl, Anna-Maria Maurer, Kallistos Weis, Alisa Welter

The pivotal role of software in our modern world imposes strong requirements on quality, correctness, and reliability of software systems. The ability to understand program code plays a key role for programmers to fulfill these requirements. Despite significant progress, research on program comprehension has had a fundamental limitation: program comprehension is a cognitive process that cannot be directly observed, which leaves considerable room for (mis)interpretation, uncertainty, and confounding factors. Thus, central questions such as “What makes a good programmer?” and “How should we program?” are surprisingly difficult to answer based on the state of the art.

Recently, researchers began to lift research on program comprehension to a new level. The key idea is to leverage recent methods from cognitive neuroscience to obtain insights into the cognitive processes involved in program comprehension. Opening the “black box” of human cognition will lead to a breakthrough in understanding the why and how of program comprehension and to a completely new perspective and methodology of measuring program comprehension, with direct implications for programming methodology, language design, and education. One of these novel methods is eye tracking, a small device observing the focus of a programmer’s eyes as x and y coordinates on the screen over time. Using this method we can answer research questions on visual attention, comprehension strategy, and differences between programmers (such as expertise).

In this seminar, you will be able to experience major steps of an eye-tracking study. You will review eyetracking literature and pose your own research questions based on existing study. Next, you can exploratively answer your research question by analyzing an existing set of eye tracking data. Specifically, each participant has to perform a literature search and propose a set of research questions targeting code comprehension measured with eye tracking. In the next step, we will provide you with real world eye-tracking data from our prior experiments. Subsequently, the research questions, the results of the analysis, and the interpretation of the results have to be incorporated into a presentation and a written thesis. To aid the literature search, the analysis, and the presentation, this seminar includes multiple preparatory sessions at the beginning of the semester.

The student presentations will be held on-site on two days in March (10. and 11.03.2025).
All other sessions will take place on-site at the university on Thursdays 12:15 PM - 2:00 PM.
Participation in all sessions is mandatory.
The first meeting will take place on Thursday November 07, at 12:15 PM.
Further information will be provided via e-mail after registration.


 

Registration

Registration for the seminar is mandatory. To distribute students among the available seminars offered by the computer science department, you have to select your preferences for the seminar on the central registration platform for seminars and will be automatically assigned to a seminar according to your preferences.

If you are assigned to this seminar, for organizational reasons, you have to sign up both in the course registration form that will be given above and in the LSF. Deadlines for the LSF (HISPOS) registration will be posted in the LSF (HISPOS) portal. Registration is possible up to three weeks after the topic assignment / kick-off.

All sessions will take place on-site at the university. Participation to all sessions is mandatory.

 

Literature

The following article is mandatory to read for this course:

Recommended Papers:

Recommended Books:

  • Holmqvist, Kenneth, et al. Eye tracking: A comprehensive guide to methods and measures. oup Oxford, 2011.
  • Duchowski, Andrew T., and Andrew T. Duchowski. Eye tracking methodology: Theory and practice. Springer, 2017.
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