Examining the differences in code reading practices employed by junior and senior developers

Sammanfattning: Reading code is an essential skill to have for developers, as it is an effective way of finding bugs and improving upon the general quality of code. Despite this, it is a skill that usually only comes with experience. Eventually developers will have read so much code they will have found what works and what doesn't work in pieces of code. The aim of this report is to find out whether or not there are any differences in code reading techniques employed by experienced code reviewers and inexperienced ones. This could hopefully enable the invention of better ways for aspiring developers to learn this skill in an efficient manner. This was done by dividing participants into experienced and inexperienced code reviewers and having them read code. Their eye movements were then tracked through the use of eye-tracking technology. The study was composed of four different tests. In two of these, the goal was to explain what the code does. In the other two, the goal was to find a number of bugs scattered throughout the code. The results showed that there were some slight differences in their focus: most notably the more experienced group focused more on the key points of the program and focused their time better, while the focus of the inexperienced group was more scattered throughout the code.