Uma abordagem visual para apoiar gerentes de projetos de software a compreender o trabalho dos desenvolvedores

Abstract

The complexity inherent in software development motivates the use of project management practices. The Project Manager (PM) is the professional responsible for performing the management practices, and one of his main activities is to manage the people involved in the project. That activity implies, among other aspects, building the team, recognizing the developers' work, and distributing the project knowledge. Thus, information about the developers' work can be valuable to perform good project management. Therefore, different strategies have been proposed to provide such information to the PM, allowing quantifying the work done by developers. Some of these strategies include mining Version Control Systems (VCS) to obtain information and apply visualization techniques to present the results to the PM. Despite the existence of these strategies, there are still gaps to be explored, such as considering the software evolution when visualizing how much work developers have done and providing visualization from different perspectives, including information from the project and individual developers' work at multiple levels of granularity. In this paper, the goal is to support Project Managers in understanding developers' work using an approach for visualizing quantitative measures applied on VCS mined information. We conducted one research organized in three stages (Rationale, Construction, and Evaluation). In the Rationale stage, we surveyed state of the art for identifying guidelines and gaps left by existing approaches. In the Construction stage, we elaborated and implemented the approach as a computational tool. In the Evaluation stage, we verified the effects of the approach on the developers' work. The results of the work include: i) the organization of the information is used to quantify the developers' work; ii) the definition of the Developer Tracker approach; iii) the construction of the Developer Tracker App, one computational support to automate the use of the approach; iv) the report of challenges encountered to conduct experimental studies in the context of the software industry; and iv) effects of using the approach on the understanding of 16 project managers about the developers' work. Future work can evolve the approach and computational support to increase its adherence in the software industry.