一句话：通过眼动实验揭示开发者在 Eclipse 中总结 Java 方法时更关注方法体，且方法规模与上下文影响阅读与总结策略。
论文研究开发者在真实 IDE 上下文中阅读并总结 Java 方法时的行为，弥补以往仅用孤立短方法图像的研究局限。作者开展眼动追踪实验，18 名开发者（含专家与新手）在 Eclipse 中可滚动、切换文件并访问全部源码，对来自 5 个系统的 63 个方法撰写摘要，同时记录注视、摘要文本和完成时间。结果表明开发者更关注方法体而非签名；控制流词项常被回看而非长时间注视，调用词项获得更多注视时间和访问次数。随着方法规模增大，专家更频繁回看方法体；专家倾向于根据注视最多的源码行撰写摘要。
An eye-tracking study of 18 developers reading and summarizing Java methods is presented. The developers provide a written summary for methods assigned to them. In total, 63 methods are used from five different systems. Previous studies on this topic use only short methods presented in isolation usually as images. In contrast, this work presents the study in the Eclipse IDE allowing access to all the source code in the system. The developer can navigate via scrolling and switching files while writing the summary. New eye-tracking infrastructure allows for this improvement in the study environment. Data collected includes eye gazes on source code, written summaries, and time to complete each summary. Unlike prior work that concluded developers focus on the signature the most, these results indicate that they tend to focus on the method body more than the signature. Moreover, both experts and novices tend to revisit control flow terms rather than reading them for a long period. They also spend a significant amount of gaze time and have higher gaze visits when they read call terms. Experts tend to revisit the body of the method significantly more frequently than its signature as the size of the method increases. Moreover, experts tend to write their summaries from source code lines that they read the most.
DOI 原文 · arXiv · PDF（开放获取） · DBLP
@inproceedings{abs-1903-03358,
title = {Developer Reading Behavior While Summarizing Java Methods: Size and Context Matters},
author = {Nahla J. Abid and Bonita Sharif and Natalia Dragan and Hend Alrasheed and Jonathan I. Maletic},
booktitle = {ICSE},
year = {2019},
doi = {10.1109/icse.2019.00052}
}