Honors Program
Date of this Version
5-2024
Document Type
Thesis
Citation
Rasgorshek, E (2024) The GitHub Gaze: Eye tracking and the Thought Process of Developers in Code Evaluations. Undergraduate Honors Thesis, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Abstract
Software developers spend a large amount of their time performing code reviews.
Code reviews are important to ensure software quality, but they are also a time sink.
In this thesis, we wanted to find out what information developers use the most when
performing code reviews and choosing issues to work on.
To do this, we conducted a study where we asked participants to complete three
different tasks related to code reviews and issues. We used eye-tracking equipment to
actually see where on the web pages the participants looked while performing these
tasks. They also completed questionnaires after tasks to give us more insight into
what they thought was important when completing the tasks.
For pull requests, the most looked-at areas were the title, comments, and the
number of added lines of code. For issues, the title, comments, and labels were
looked at the most. The impact of these findings are discussed with respect to multiple
different stakeholders: open source projects, researchers, and educators. These results
can tie into the process of developers reviewing code including teaching practices on
code reviewing.
Keywords— code review, eye tracker, open source
Comments
Copyright Ethan Rasgorshek 2024