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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. 

Eye tracking tools are used in software engineering research to study various software development activities. However, a major limitation of these tools is their inability to track gaze data for activities that involve source code editing. We present a novel solution to support eye tracking experiments for tasks involving source code edits as an extension of the iTrace community infrastructure. We introduce the iTrace-Atom plugin and gazel—a Python data processing pipeline that maps gaze information to changing source code elements and provides researchers with a way to query this dynamic data. iTrace-Atom is evaluated via a series of simulations and is over 99% accurate at high eye-tracking speeds of over 1,000Hz. iTrace and gazel completely revolutionize the way eye tracking studies are conducted in realistic settings with the presence of scrolling, context switching, and now editing. This opens the doors to support many day-to-day software engineering tasks such as bug fixing, adding new features, and refactoring. 

A large portion of the cost of any software lies in the time spent by developers in understanding a program’s source code before any changes can be undertaken. Measuring program comprehension is not a trivial task. In fact, different studies use self-reported and various psycho-physiological measures as proxies. In this research, we propose a methodology using functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) and eye tracking devices as an objective measure of program comprehension that allows researchers to conduct studies in environments close to real world settings, at identifier level of granularity. We validate our methodology and apply it to study the impact of lexical, structural, and readability issues on developers’ cognitive load during bug localization tasks. Our study involves 25 undergraduate and graduate students and 21 metrics. Results show that the existence of lexical inconsistencies in the source code significantly increases the cognitive load experienced by participants not only on identifiers involved in the inconsistencies but also throughout the entire code snippet. We did not find statistical evidence that structural inconsistencies increase the average cognitive load that participants experience, however, both types of inconsistencies result in lower performance in terms of time and success rate. Finally, we observe that self-reported task difficulty, cognitive load, and fixation duration do not correlate and appear to be measuring different aspects of task difficulty.