Studying Developer Reading Behavior on Stack Overflow during API Summarization Tasks

Stack Overflow is commonly used by software developers to help solve problems they face while working on software tasks such as fixing bugs or building new features. Recent research has explored how the content of Stack Overflow posts affects attraction and how the reputation of users attracts more visitors. However, there is very little evidence on the effect that visual attractors and content quantity have on directing gaze toward parts of a post, and which parts hold the attention of a user longer. Moreover, little is known about how these attractors help developers (students and professionals) answer comprehension questions. This paper presents an eye tracking study on thirty developers constrained to reading only Stack Overflow posts while summarizing four open source methods or classes. Results indicate that on average paragraphs and code snippets were fixated upon most often and longest. When ranking pages by number of appearance of code blocks and paragraphs, we found that while the presence of more code blocks did not affect number of fixations, the presence of increasing numbers of plain text paragraphs significantly drove down the fixations on comments. SO posts that were looked at only by students had longer fixation times on code elements within the first ten fixations. We found that 16 developer summaries contained 5 or more meaningful terms from SO posts they viewed. We discuss how our observations of reading behavior could benefit how users structure their posts.