Abstract

Program comprehension is a very important activity during the development and the maintenance of programs. This activity has been actively studied in the past decades to present software engineers with the most accurate and—hopefully—most useful pieces of information on the organisation, algorithms, executions, evolution, and documentation of a program. Yet, only few work tried to understand concretely how software engineers obtain and use this information. Software engineers mainly use sight to obtain information about a program, usually from source code or class diagrams. Therefore, we use eye-tracking to collect data about the use of class diagrams by software engineers during program comprehension. We introduce a new visualisation technique to aggregate and to present the collected data. We also report the results and surprising insights gained from two case studies. 1

Citations