Visualization of Generic Software Quality Metrics

Company: TIOBE Software BV, www.tiobe.com, de Zaale 11, 5612 AJ, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Contact Person: Paul Jansen
Time Frame: 6 months

TIOBE Software has developed a framework, called TICS, to measure software quality automatically. The TICS framework is in use by multinationals such as Philips, TomTom and Océ to monitor their products during development. Currently more than 100 million lines of code are checked each day by the TICS framework for more than 250 projects worldwide.

All quality data that is collected is stored in a database. Trends and drill downs can be consulted via a web application called the TICS viewer (see figure). See www.tiobe.com for more screenshots of the TICS viewer. Until now, TIOBE defined the set of quality metrics that is supported. Examples of such metrics are coding standard violations, test coverage results, cyclometric complexity and various line counts. In the very near future, TIOBE will add so called generic metrics to its framework. This means that customers can define their own (combined) metrics. Examples of such customer defined metrics are comments per class or architecture violations.

A problem with generic metrics is visualization. The current TICS viewer is too static to support generic metrics. Requirements are:

• Easier drill down facilities (now one has to click on every subdirectory to drill down)
• Combine metrics in one view (one can see only metric at a time at the moment)
• Root cause analysis (what is the root cause of a certain trend? The answer should be one click away)
• Define generic metrics in a graphical way

The deliverables of the assignment are:

• Definition of the new user interaction model
• Specification of the new user interface metaphor (screenshots)
• Prototype showing the results of the previous two deliverables