Visualizing Metric Trends for Software Portfolio Quality Management: Software Artifact "Portfoliotrix" [article]

Patric Genfer, Johann Grabner, Christina Zoffi, Mario Bernhart, Thomas Grechenig
2021 Zenodo  
Accompanying software artifact for the IEEE VISSOFT 2021 conference paper: "Visualizing Metric Trends for Software Portfolio Quality Management" Please consult the file "README.md" as an introduction to this artifact. The file "UPDATE.md" describes the supplemental material. Abstract—Software portfolios of today's companies are comprised of a variety of heterogeneous, modular, and often polyglot software solutions. Ensuring high-quality standards across these entire portfolios raises additional
more » ... challenges for quality engineers and requires new strategies and visualization approaches to support software quality management decisions. In this paper, we study the information needs of software quality engineers that drive these decisions on portfolio-level and propose Portfoliotrix - an expert visualization prototype for a portfolio-wide analysis and comparison of software quality metric trends. For this, we first introduce our four-phase fully automated data-mining process for gathering and aggregating quality metric data from the underlying software repositories. We then present our application frontend that implements different visualization and filtering concepts to satisfy eight specific information needs derived from our prior qualitative semi-structured expert interviews. A final scenario-based expert evaluation confirms the practical relevance of our prototype. Experts took less time to complete quality-related management tasks with our tool than they had estimated when relying only upon existing toolsets. Moreover, our visualization system reached the System Usability Scale (SUS) score of "good" with 76.7 points.
doi:10.5281/zenodo.5475463 fatcat:6woyrd64mnbjzafwjz33axwajy