An Exploration of Shared Visual Attention in Collaborative Programming

This work-in-progress paper reports on the initial results of an eye-tracking research of collaborative program development, more particularly, in the case of pair programming. The study was conducted in nearly industrial-like settings and focused on pair programming productivity and improvement of the protocol that is followed by the pair-programming pair. Results are based on both the practical experience during the study and on an analysis of the recorded eye-movements. We present a descriptive analysis of visual attention during pair programming. We speculate that the pairprogramming protocol is partly visible in both participants’ eye-movements and can be used as an additional source of evidence when investigating the true protocol that the pair actually follows. We discuss the collaborative view on Psychology of Programming (PoP), which extends it to Psychology of Software Engineering (PoSE) and we then outline the future directions of our research.