An Eye for Trust: An Exploration of Developers' Trust Perceptions Through Urgency and Reputation

TL;DR

This study uses eye tracking in a controlled experiment to examine how urgency and reputation influence developers' perceptions of code trustworthiness, revealing behavioral impacts but limited influence on reuse decisions.

Contribution

It provides the first controlled experimental evidence on how urgency and reputation affect developers' trust perceptions during code review.

Findings

Priority affects review behavior, evaluation time, and perceived quality.

Reputation influences visual attention but not review performance.

Developers overlook the impact of urgency and reputation on reuse decisions.

Abstract

Code reuse is a widespread practice across software development projects, suggesting an inherent trust in the reused code. Yet, there is a lack of a fundamental understanding of developers' trust and how various factors mold their trust-based cognitive processes. Drawing from the psychology of compliance and trust, we present the results of the first controlled experiment (n=37) which uses eye tracking to explore how urgency (represented by code priority level) and reputation (represented by the experience level of the code's author) influence developers' perceptions of code trustworthiness. Our research revealed that the priority assigned to a code patch significantly influenced developers' code review behavior, impacting their evaluation time, cognitive load, and perceived quality. However, the decision to incorporate and implement the code was not affected . Eye tracking data revealed that there were variations in overall visual code scanning and the distribution of attention across identical code patches labeled as written by senior vs. junior developers. Yet, there were no significant performance differences. Moreover, our participants nominate code functionality, quality, and comprehensibility as primary factors in code evaluation. Despite noticeable changes in code review behavior, our participants surprisingly overlooked the substantial influence of urgency and reputation on their decisions to review and reuse code changes. This study takes the next step toward a better understanding of trust in software engineering and may inform future research about code review platforms and guidelines, code reuse, and automated code generation.