A Deeper Analysis of AOI Coverage in Code Reading

ABSTRACT The proportion of areas of interest that are covered with gaze is employed as metric to compare natural-language text and source code reading, as well as novice and expert programmers’ code reading behavior. Two levels of abstraction are considered for AOIs: lines and elements. AOI coverage is significantly higher on natural-language text than on code, so a detailed account is provided on the areas that are skipped. Between novice and expert programmers, the overall AOI coverage is comparable. However, segmenting the stimuli into meaningful components revealed that they distribute their gaze differently and partly look at different AOIs. Thus, while programming expertise does not strongly influence AOI coverage quantitatively, it does so qualitatively.