An Analysis of Program Comprehension Process by Eye Movement Mapping to Syntax Trees

To analyze the developers’ eye movement to the source code while understanding a program, researchers need to map eye movements to the position of the source code being read. However, the eye movements are recorded as a list of the display’s coordinates, hence scrolling and window movement on the editor make mapping difficult. Further, to extract the comprehension behavior for different source codes, it is necessary to consider the differences in control flow, format, identifiers, and other factors, which is time-consuming during analysis. This study analyzed eye movement during program comprehension tasks using our proposed method. Our method identifies the word being looked at and converts it into a corresponding syntax node. The experimental results show a significant difference in the syntax node focused on between the understood/not-understood participant groups. The experiment did not use the conventional eye movement analysis for individual source codes and demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.