Visualisation environment for global software development management

Abstract

Global software development (GSD) involves new challenges that need to be addressed when project managers have to make significant decisions such as task allocation, resource assignments, etc. Visualisation techniques can be useful as regards helping managers to process complex information and interpret the data shown. The main goal of this study is to describe a visualisation environment with which to support the decision-making process in GSD contexts. The environment contains a set of visualisation metaphors that can be organised in a hierarchical manner and which show both the information related to GSD projects and subprojects and the organisational context of companies and their corresponding factories. The DESGLOSA tool has been developed to support the visualisation of measures and indicators in GSD. The tool has been applied in one of the INDRA Company's GSD projects and two surveys have been conducted to validate the potential usefulness of the environment and its applicability in the company. The results of these surveys were that most of the participants agreed that the tool is useful and stated that they would be willing to incorporate this kind of applications into their daily work.