TY - GEN
T1 - Quantifying programmers' mental workload during program comprehension based on cerebral blood flow measurement
T2 - 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2014
AU - Nakagawa, Takao
AU - Kamei, Yasutaka
AU - Uwano, Hidetake
AU - Monden, Akito
AU - Matsumoto, Kenichi
AU - German, Daniel M.
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2014 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - Program comprehension is a fundamental activity in software development that cannot be easily measured, as it is performed inside the human brain. Using a wearable Near Infra-red Spectroscopy (NIRS) device to measure cerebral blood flow, this paper tries to answer the question: Can the measurement of brain blood-flow quantify programmers' mental workload during program comprehension activities? We performed a controlled experiment with 10 subjects; 8 of them showed high cerebral blood flow while understanding strongly obfuscated programs (requiring high mental workload). This suggests the possibility of using NIRS to measure the mental workload of a person during software development activities.
AB - Program comprehension is a fundamental activity in software development that cannot be easily measured, as it is performed inside the human brain. Using a wearable Near Infra-red Spectroscopy (NIRS) device to measure cerebral blood flow, this paper tries to answer the question: Can the measurement of brain blood-flow quantify programmers' mental workload during program comprehension activities? We performed a controlled experiment with 10 subjects; 8 of them showed high cerebral blood flow while understanding strongly obfuscated programs (requiring high mental workload). This suggests the possibility of using NIRS to measure the mental workload of a person during software development activities.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84903597262&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84903597262&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2591062.2591098
DO - 10.1145/2591062.2591098
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84903597262
SN - 9781450327688
T3 - 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE Companion 2014 - Proceedings
SP - 448
EP - 451
BT - 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE Companion 2014 - Proceedings
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 31 May 2014 through 7 June 2014
ER -