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. 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. This email must be sent no later than Tuesday 12:15 (48 hours before the Q and A session), as we plan the sessions. |
How to conduct a literature searchWritten 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
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQkZrvFZ_lY Best regards, |
LSF Important InformationWritten 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 |
Demographic Data in the data setsWritten on 07.11.24 by Annabelle Bergum Hello everybody, these are the categories our questionnaires covered:
Hello everybody, these are the categories our questionnaires covered:
The questionnaires will be uploaded soon. |
First SessionWritten 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, |
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.
Literature
The following article is mandatory to read for this course:
Recommended Papers:
- Analysis of code reading to gain more insight in program comprehension
- A Replication Study on Code Comprehension and Expertise using Lightweight Biometric Sensors
- Biases and Differences in Code Review using Medical Imaging and Eye-Tracking: Genders, Humans, and Machines
- Correlates of Programmer Efficacy and their Link to Experience: A Combined EEG and Eye-Tracking Study
- Eye Movements in Code Reading: Relaxing the Linear Order
- Eye-tracking Metrics in Software Engineering
- Moving towards objective measures of program comprehension
- The Effect of Poor Source Code Lexicon and Readability on Developers’ Cognitive Load
- The Role of the Insula in Intuitive Expert Bug Detection in Computer Code: An fMRI Study
- What Drives the Reading Order of Programmers? An Eye Tracking Study
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.