Eye-Tracking Study of Machine Learning Programmers

Rodeghero et al. have used eye tracking to investigate what aspects of source code developers look towards for understanding a code base. Their work, however, was focused on traditional software development using imperative programming languages.

With data-driven as a new, growing development paradigm, many of the research in traditional software engineering has to stand up to the questions whether it applies to this paradigm as well.

In this thesis you will address this question by:

• Perform a literature analysis
• Replicating the original study for traditional software development
• Extend it by performing the study in a Machine Learning context
• Compare the results of the two studies
• Writing a thesis and presenting your results to an audience
• (Optional) co-writing a research paper

You need:

• Strong communication skills in german and/or english
• General knowledge of how to perform a user study
• General knowledge of statistical evaluation of research results