Human Attention During Localization of Memory Bugs in C Programs

TL;DR

This study investigates how human programmers visually attend to code when locating common memory bugs in C programs, revealing patterns associated with successful bug detection.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of visual attention patterns during memory bug localization in C, linking attention behaviors to success and failure.

Findings

Success correlates with specific attention patterns

Programmers focus on certain code regions during bug detection

Differences in attention patterns distinguish success from failure

Abstract

This paper presents a study of human visual attention during localization of memory bugs in C. Human visual attention refers to the mechanical processes by which we selectively process and prioritize information. Visual attention is important to study because it is central to what information people (who are sighted) use to solve a particular problem. Meanwhile, memory bugs are among the most common types of bugs in C programs that manifest as a variety of program faults. 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, which are among the most common memory bugs. 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 of visual attention patterns during success versus failure cases.