Capturing software traceability links from developers' eye gazes

Abstract

The paper presents a novel approach for recovering software traceability links from developers' eye gazes. An eye tracker is used to capture eye gazes while developers perform software maintenance tasks within the Eclipse IDE. An algorithm is presented that establishes a set of traceability links from the eye-gaze data of several developer sessions. A preliminary study assesses the feasibility and validity of the approach. The links generated by the approach were validated by another set of developers. Results indicate that our algorithm achieves strong recall when developers accurately perform bug-localization tasks.