The use of eye tracking in software development

Abstract

Eye trackers have been routinely used in psychology reading experiments and in website usability studies for many years. However, it is only recently that they have been used by more researchers in the software engineering community. In this paper, we categorize two broad areas in which eye tracking technology can benefit software development in a practical way. The first area includes using the eye tracker as an assessment tool for software artifacts, tools, and techniques. The second area deals with using eye tracking data from developers to inform certain software tools and software development tasks such as providing developer recommendations and software traceability tasks. Examples of experiments and studies done in each of these broad areas is presented and discussed along with future work. The results point towards many benefits that eye trackers provide to augment the daily lives of programmers during software development.