Process inspection support: An industrial case study

Abstract

Organizational factors such as team structure, coordination among engineers, or processes have a significant impact on software quality and development progress. Projects often take much longer to complete than planned and miscommunications among engineers are common. Yet, the process for exploring the project-specific or organization-specific root causes why this happens is still poorly supported. Investigations are cumbersome and require significant effort. In the context of this industrial case study, our industry partner was interested in measuring and assessing how the organization structure and issue handling processes ultimately affected software quality and time. Reducing the effort of such investigations/retrospectives and speeding up fact finding is important as it allows for more frequent, informed engineering process improvements and feedback to managers, team leads, and engineers. This paper describes our approach of pairing process metrics with visual historical inspection of issues. Stakeholders such as managers, team leads, or quality assurance engineers inspect metrics (and deviations from expected values) for individual issues and utilize a historical visualization of the affected (and related) issues to obtain insights into the reason for the metric (deviation) and its root cause. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach based on our ProcessInspector prototype providing access to data on four real industry projects and a qualitative evaluation with team leads and group leads from our industry partner.