CodeGRITS stands for Gaze Recording & IDE Tracking System. It's a plugin developed by the SaNDwich Lab and is specially designed for empirical software engineering researchers. CodeGRITS is built on top of IntelliJ Platform SDK, with wide compatibility with the entire family of JetBrains IDEs and Tobii eye-tracking devices, to track developers’ IDE interactions and eye gaze data.

The data collected by CodeGRITS can be used by empirical SE researchers to understand the behaviors of developers, especially those related to eye gaze. CodeGRITS also provides a real-time data API for future plugin developers and researchers to design context-aware programming support tools.

We provide an example project DataStreamReceiver that builds on top of the real-time data API. It is designed to receive the IDE and eye tracking data and directly visualize them in two separate windows.

• 🔍 IDE Tracking: CodeGRITS tracks developers’ IDE interactions, including mouse clicks, keyboard inputs, etc.
• 👁️ Eye Tracking: CodeGRITS tracks developers’ eye gaze data from Tobii eye-tracking devices, and maps them to corresponding source code elements.
• 💻 Screen Recording: CodeGRITS simultaneously records developers’ screen for visualizing their behaviors.
• 🔨 Research Toolkit: CodeGRITS provides a set of extra features for empirical SE researchers, including dynamic configuration, activity labeling, real-time data API, etc.
• 🗃️ Data Export: CodeGRITS exports data in XML format for further data analysis. See Data Format for more details.

• CodeGRITS provides cross-platform support for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and is expected to be compatible with the entire family of JetBrains IDEs, including IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, etc.
• CodeGRITS could extract the abstract syntax tree (AST) structure of eye gazes on multiple programming languages, as long as the IDE supports them, including Java, Python, C/C++, JavaScript, etc.

Please see the CodeGRITS website for more details.

The paper of CodeGRITS has been accepted by ICSE 2024 Demonstrations Track. The PDF version is available here. The video demonstration is available on YouTube.

Please cite the following if you use CodeGRITS in your research.

@inproceedings{tang2024codegrits,
  title={CodeGRITS: A Research Toolkit for Developer Behavior and Eye Tracking in IDE},
  author={Tang, Ningzhi and An, Junwen and Chen, Meng and Bansal, Aakash and Huang, Yu and McMillan, Collin and Li, Toby Jia-Jun},
  booktitle={46th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (ICSE-Companion '24)},
  year={2024},
  organization={ACM}
}

Please feel free to contact Ningzhi Tang at [email protected] or Junwen An at [email protected] if you have any questions or suggestions.