IssuePlayer: An extensible framework for visual assessment of issue management in software development projects

This article presents a software visualization framework which can help project managers and team leaders in overseeing issues and their management in software development. To automate the framework, a dashboard tool called IssuePlayer is developed. The tool is used to study the trends in which different types of issues (e.g., bugs, support requests) are submitted, handled and piled up in software projects and use that information to identify process symptoms, e.g., the times when the code maintenance team is not responsive enough. The interactive nature of the tool enables identification of the team members who have not been as active as they were expected to be in such cases. The user can play, pause, rewind and forward the issue management histories using the tool. The tool is empirically evaluated by two industrial partners in North America and Europe. The survey and qualitative feedback support the usefulness and effectiveness of the tool in assessing the issue management processes and the performance of team members. The tool can be used complementarily in parallel with textual information provided by issue management tools (e.g., BugZilla) to enable team leaders to conduct effective and successful monitoring of issue management in software development projects.