Combining and Visualizing Time-Oriented Data from the Software Engineering Toolset

Abstract

The simultaneous use of more than two different data sources from the software engineering toolset is still uncommon in the research areas of software evolution and visualization. In our work, we address this research gap by the design and evaluation of three interactive visualizations which combine the data from the version control (VCS), the issue tracking (ITS), and the continuous integration (CI) system. After analyzing the information needs of a project team and describing the available data, we selected change impact, code ownership, and activity peaks as our visualization topics. Then, we adapted suitable visualization techniques from the literature to meet our design requirements. After implementation, we evaluated our visualizations by conducting a usability test with ten senior software engineers. On the system usability scale (SUS), our visualizations achieved the rating "good" from the participants. A scenario success rate of 88% and the qualitative user feedback has provided evidence for the benefits of visualizing combined data from the VCS, ITS, and CI system.