Visualization of version control and issue tracking data as a tool of software analytics

Need for speed –project N4S is a research concortium funded by Tekes and coordinated by Digile Its goal is to increase competitiviness of Finnish software companies by researching real-time business models

What is software analytics? Software analytics aims to analyze computer programs and the processes with which they are developed. Software analytics needs to produce actionable advice to be useful Ie. It needs to provide concrete advice with which to either increase productivity or quality

What is software analytics? In the past software analytics aimed to find a general model of software development Later it has been accepted that there is no general model that suits all projects Nowadays software analytics aims to find methods, with which to find locally useful advice

Why visualizations? Visualizations are an intuitive way to get a picture of large datasets A good visualization can ’reveal’ information in data even without statistical analysis

Data to be visualized Data from version control systems, such as Git Data from issue tracking systems, such as Jira CVSAnalY was used to get data from Git repositories: there were some problems with the tool

Visualization tools Google Charts: Easy to use, but not very flexible D3.js: very flexible, but not easy to use There are large number of visualization libraries, but mostly they weren’t suitable

Early experiments

Later visualizations

Reusability of visualizations Custom made visualization was useful for the project, but not very reusable As such it was quite cumbersome to make visualizations for other companies Due to these reasons, we decided to make a reusable visualization library for N4S project

Visualization library We made an visualization library with D3.js, it takes csv files as input. It is also possible to draw charts on top of existing charts. Some drawbacks, such as that the user needs to implement parsing of csv files. Also, collecting data had to be done manually

Visualization library

For the mentioned reasons, this version remains a proof of concept that isn’t very practical in real use cases However, lessons learned from this version can be used in making the next version: a database for the data, and a proper web UI will make it easier to use