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Novel research ideas require strong evaluations. Modern software engineering research evaluation typically requires a set of benchmark programs. Open source software repositories have provided a great opportunity for researchers to find such programs for use in their evaluations. Many tools/techniques have been developed to help automate the curation of open source software. There has also been encouragement for researchers to provide their research artifacts so that other researchers can easily reproduce the results. We argue that these two trends (i.e., curating open source software for research evaluation and the providing of research artifacts) drive the need for Software Engineer Collaboratories (SEClabs). We envision research communities coming together to create SEClab instances, where research artifacts can be made publicly available to other researchers. The community can then vet such artifacts and make them available as a service, thus turning the collaboratory into a Collaboratory as a Service (CaaS). If our vision is realized, the speed and transparency of research will drastically increase.
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VITALSE: visualizing eye tracking and biometric data
Recent research in empirical software engineering is applying techniques from neurocognitive science and breaking new grounds in the ways that researchers can model and analyze the cognitive processes of developers as they interact with software artifacts. However, given the novelty of this line of research, only one tool exists to help researchers represent and analyze this kind of multi-modal biometric data. While this tool does help with visualizing temporal eyetracking and physiological data, it does not allow for the mapping of physiological data to source code elements, instead projecting information over images of code. One drawback of this is that researchers are still unable to meaningfully combine and map physiological and eye tracking data to source code artifacts. The use of images also bars the support of long or multiple code files, which prevents researchers from analyzing data from experiments conducted in realistic settings. To address these drawbacks, we propose VITALSE, a tool for the interactive visualization of combined multi-modal biometric data for software engineering tasks. VITALSE provides interactive and customizable temporal heatmaps created with synchronized eyetracking and biometric data. The tool supports analysis on multiple files, user defined annotations for points of interest over source code elements, and high level customizable metric summaries for the provided dataset. VITALSE, a video demonstration, and sample data to demonstrate its capabilities can be found at http://www.vitalse.app.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1755995
- PAR ID:
- 10289639
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ICSE '20: Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 57 to 60
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3377812.3382154
