Determining Differences in Reading Behavior between Experts and Novices by Investigating Eye Movement on Source Code Constructs during a Bug Fixing Task

Abstract

This research compares the eye movement of expert and novice programmers working on a bug fixing task. This comparison aims at investigating which source code elements programmers focus on when they review Java source code. Programmer code reading behaviors at the line and term levels are used to characterize the differences between experts and novices. The study analyzes programmers' eye movements over identified source code areas using an existing eye tracking dataset of 12 experts and 10 novices. The results show that the difference between experts and novices is significant in source code element coverage. Specifically, novices read more method signatures, variable declarations, identifiers, and keywords compared to experts. However, experts are better at finishing the task using fewer source code elements when compared to novices. Moreover, programmers tend to focus on the method signatures the most while reading the code.