scvRipper: Video Scraping Tool for Modeling Developers' Behavior Using Interaction Data

Lingfeng Bao, Jing Li, Zhenchang Xing, Xinyu Wang, Bo Zhou

Abstract: Screen-capture tool can record a user's interaction with software and application content as a stream of screenshots which is usually stored in certain video format. Researchers have used screen-captured videos to study the programming activities that the developers carry out. In these studies, screen-captured videos had to be manually transcribed to extract software usage and application content data for the study purpose. This paper presents a computer-vision based video scraping tool (called scvRipper) that can automatically transcribe a screen-captured video into time-series interaction data according to the analyst's need. This tool can address the increasing need for automatic behavioral data collection methods in the studies of human aspects of software engineering.