Tracking developer eye movements unobstrusively while they work on software tasks can give us insights into the thought processes that go into solving them. Eye movements are essential to cognitive processes because they focus a developer’s gaze on parts of source code that is processed by the brain. In this talk, I will highlight how eye tracking has been used to gauge visual effort in readability studies and my vision on how it can be used in future software engineering studies to learn about readable code.

Bonita Sharif, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska USA. She received her Ph.D. in 2010 and MS in 2003 in Computer Science from Kent State University, U.S.A and B.S. in Computer Science from Cyprus College, Nicosia Cyprus. Her research interests are in eye tracking related to software engineering, program comprehension, empirical software engineering, emotional awareness, software traceability, and software visualization to support maintenance of large systems. She has authored over 40 refereed publications. She serves on numerous program committees including ICSME, VISSOFT, SANER, ICSE NIER, and ICPC. Sharif is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award and the NSF CRI award related to empowering software engineering with eye tracking. She directs the Software Engineering Research and Empirical Studies Lab in the Computer Science and Engineering department at UNL.Check out the iTrace infrastructure that supports eye tracking within developer work environments at http://www.i-trace.org