Pupillography as Indicator of Programmers' Mental Effort and Cognitive Overload

Abstract

Our research explores a recent paradigm called Biofeedback Augmented Software Engineering (BASE) that introduces a strong new element in the software development process: the programmers' biofeedback. In this Practical Experience Report we present the results of an experiment to evaluate the possibility of using pupillography to gather biofeedback from the programmers. The idea is to use pupillography to get meta information about the programmers' cognitive and emotional states (stress, attention, mental effort level, cognitive overload,...) during code development to identify conditions that may precipitate programmers making bugs or bugs escaping human attention, and tag the corresponding code locations in the software under development to provide online warnings to the programmer or identify code snippets that will need more intensive testing. The experiments evaluate the use of pupillography as cognitive load predictor, compare the results with the mental effort perceived by programmers using NASATLX, and discuss different possibilities for the use of pupillography as biofeedback sensor in real software development scenarios.