Reverse engineering time-series interaction data from screen-captured videos

Abstract

In recent years the amount of research on human aspects of software engineering has increased. Many studies use screen-capture software (e.g., Snagit) to record developers' behavior as they work on software development tasks. The recorded task videos capture direct information about which activities the developers carry out with which content and in which applications during the task. Such behavioral data can help researchers and practitioners understand and improve software engineering practices from human perspective. However, extracting time-series interaction data (software usage and application content) from screen-captured videos requires manual transcribing and coding of videos, which is tedious and error-prone. In this paper we present a computer-vision based video scraping technique to automatically reverse-engineer time-series interaction data from screen-captured videos. We report the usefulness, effectiveness and runtime performance of our video scraping technique using a case study of the 29 hours task videos of 20 developers in the two development tasks.