Poster Presentation

Poster E in Poster Session E: Thursday, August 6, 10:30 am – 12:15 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Human Attention During Localization of Memory Bugs in C Programs

Emory Michaels¹, Robert Wallace¹, Matthew Robison¹, Yu Huang², Collin McMillan¹; ¹University of Notre Dame, ²Vanderbilt University

Presenter: Emory Michaels

This paper presents a study of human visual attention during localization of memory bugs in C programs. Human visual attention refers to the mechanical processes by which we selectively process and prioritize information. Visual attention is important because it is central to what information people (who are sighted) use to solve a problem. Meanwhile, memory bugs are among the most common types of bugs in C programs. In this paper, we study human visual attention while people attempt to locate memory bugs in code. We recruit 21 programmers to locate between one and eight memory bugs in three C programs for 1.5–2 hours each. In total we collected observations of 31 hours of programmer effort. The bugs in our study cover memory leaks, overflows, and double frees. We analyze the task outcomes in terms of success rate and related factors, patterns of visual attention overall such as what lines and functions are read, and finally we explore differences in visual attention patterns during success versus failure cases.

Topic Area: Methods, Tools, Theory & Neural Coding