An Interactive Dashboard for Visualizing the Provenance of Software Development Processes

Abstract

Software development is a complex process involving many people and development tools and their interactions; during development, a lot of data such as source code, documents, or software artifacts and information such as issues, discussions, or code analyses are generated or modified. In addition to the analysis and visualization of software systems, it is useful to analyze the software development process to obtain better information about the quality, reliability, and trustworthiness of the software. To gain insights and knowledge about software development processes, we extract the provenance of development processes, especially from version control systems for Git-based software projects, and visualize the provenance information using graph visualization, metrics representation, and development timelines; including an integration of these methods into a web-based dashboard. With the help of visual provenance representations, project managers can gain an overview and insights into development progress, effects of process changes, and interactions among developers and with external contributors, which we exemplify with a case study of a software with high social relevance.