Metrics Visualization Techniques Based on Historical Origins and Functional Layers for Developments by Multiple Organizations

Software developments involving multiple organizations such as Open Source Software (OSS)-based projects tend to have numerous defects when one organization develops and another organization edits the program source code files. Developments with complex file creation, modification history (origin), and software architecture (functional layer) are increasing in OSS-based development. As an example, we focus on an Android smart phone and a VirtualBox development project, and propose new visualization techniques for product metrics based on file origin and functional layers. One is the Metrics Area Figure, which can express duplication of edits by multiple organizations intuitively using overlapping figures. The other is Origin City, which was inspired by Code City. It can represent the scale and other measurements, while simultaneously stacking functional layers as 3D buildings. The contributions of our paper are to propose new techniques, implement them as web applications, and share the results of our questionnaire. Our proposed techniques are useful not only to visualize the measured metrics, but also to improve the product quality.