How Developers Make Decisions When Choosing Issues and Reviewing Code: An Eye Tracking GitHub Study

Igor Scaliante Wiese, Jasmine Boyer, Ethan Rasgorshek, Gustavo Pinto, Marco Gerosa, Igor Steinmacher, Bonita Sharif

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The paper presents a pilot eye-tracking study on how developers choose what issues to work on and how they perform code-reviewing tasks within the GitHub ecosystem. In this study, we recorded the eye movements of thirteen developers to understand what they look at on the GitHub interface to make decisions. They completed four tasks namely, ranking a list of open issues to work on, prioritizing pull requests, the likelihood of pull requests being accepted, and finally evaluating 25 diverse user profiles for pull request acceptance likelihood. Results suggest that the title, description, and labels are the most important information when developers choose the issue to work on and pull requests to review. The quality of the description and reproduction steps also influenced how the developer ranked an issue. The contribution heat map and repository language were relevant areas that attracted more attention when they looked at user profiles.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings, ETRA 2025 - ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications
EditorsStephen N. Spencer
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Electronic)9798400714870
DOIs
StatePublished - May 25 2025
Event17th ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications, ETRA 2025 - Tokyo, Japan
Duration: May 26 2025May 29 2025

Publication series

NameEye Tracking Research and Applications Symposium (ETRA)

Conference

Conference17th ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications, ETRA 2025
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityTokyo
Period5/26/255/29/25

Keywords

  • code review
  • eye tracking study
  • GitHub study
  • open source systems
  • social signals

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Ophthalmology
  • Sensory Systems

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