CodeGRITS: A Research Toolkit for Developer Behavior and Eye Tracking in IDE

Abstract

Traditional methodologies for exploring programmers’ behaviors have primarily focused on capturing their actions within the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), offering limited view into their cognitive processes. Recent emergent work started using eye-tracking techniques in software engineering (SE) research. However, the lack of tools specifically designed for coordinated data collection poses technical barriers and requires significant effort from researchers who wish to combine these two complementary approaches. To address this gap, we present CodeGRITS, a plugin specifically designed for SE researchers. CodeGRITS is built on top of IntelliJ’s SDK, with wide compatibility with the entire family of JetBrains IDEs to track developers’ IDE interactions and eye gaze data. CodeGRITS also features various practical features for SE research (e.g., activity labeling) and a real-time API that provides interoperability for integration with other research instruments and developer tools. In addition to CodeGRITS, I will also talk about two other SE topics on Software Composition Analysis and LLM-based Code Generation.