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

2026-04-09

AI Summary

This study addresses the limited understanding of how developers form trust during code reuse, particularly regarding the roles of task urgency and author reputation. For the first time in software engineering trust research, eye-tracking methodology is employed in a controlled user experiment, combining quantitative and qualitative analyses to investigate how code priority (urgency) and author expertise (reputation) influence developers’ perceived credibility and code inspection behaviors. Findings reveal that urgency significantly affects review duration, cognitive load, and perceived quality, while reputation shapes visual scanning patterns; however, neither factor substantially alters final adoption decisions. The study underscores functionality, quality, and readability as central criteria in code evaluation and elucidates the subtle yet critical role of external cues in guiding attention allocation and cognitive processing during code assessment.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Motion & Tracking
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Other Foundations of Reasoning under Uncertainty

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

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.

Problem

• trust
• code reuse
• urgency
• reputation
• code review

Innovation

• eye tracking
• developer trust
• code reuse
• urgency
• reputation