Taupe

Program comprehension is a very important activity during the development and the maintenance of programs. This activity has been actively studied in the past decades to present software engineers with the most accurate and---hopefully---most useful pieces of information on the organisation, algorithms, executions, evolution, and documentation of a program. Yet, only few work tried to understand concretely how software engineers obtain and use this information. Software engineers mainly use sight to obtain information about a program, usually from source code or class diagrams. Therefore, we use eye-tracking to collect data about the use of class diagrams by software engineers during program comprehension. We introduce a new visualisation technique to aggregate and to present the collected data. We also report the results and surprising insights gained from two case studies.