Gazing at Code Review(s)

Modern code review, where developers use tools to review code diffs to improve quality and build shared understanding, has gained wide-spread adoption in industry. Consequently, developers are spending a lot of time trying to understand and review other developers' code. Given the limited supply of (expensive) engineers there is much to be gained from simplifying this task. Progress in the area of eye-tracking (measuring what engineers look at and in what order) has opened up the possibility of providing developer tools that can adapt to the current needs of a developer in a specific context. Using eye-tracking, we aim to study modern code review and to investigate how intelligent assistance, driven by eye-tracking, may assist developers during this activity. This project proposal is aimed at the ELLIIT focus theme ‘next-generation software technology’ (theme C) and is a cross-disciplinary collaboration between Computer Science, Software Engineering, Design Sciences, and Psychology at LU and BTH.