Eye trackers are being used by software engineering researchers to study how developers work. In this technical briefing, we give an overview of eye tracking and how it can help researchers to conduct their own studies. Eye tracking studies are done on a single screen of text and there is no support for scrolling or switching between files. This scenario is impractical to study developers as they actually work on large software artifacts. To overcome this an Eclipse plugin, iTrace, is introduced that monitors developers eye movements even in the presence of scrolling and file switching within an IDE. In addition, it automatically maps the eye gaze to source code elements. Existing work using iTrace is presented followed by a scenario of how to setup and run an eye tracking study. Data filtering, data cleaning, and data analysis are also discussed.
['Bonita Sharif', 'Jonathan I. Maletic']
iTrace: Overcoming the Limitations of Short Code Examples in Eye Tracking Experiments