Analytics for software development

Summarizing and measuring development activity

“…Similarly, P27 described the importance of features (33) : "I would expect to include a description of the new feature, how the new feature impacts the current work flow". Other primary artifacts that were mentioned included documentation (12) , modules (6) , and user stories (6) , as detailed by P20: "I'd like to know how many stories moved through the development cycle".…”

“…We first focus on the expected updates, where updates on the status (93) play a central role as P40 explained: "I would report a status report of activities, what was done, what state, in which branch, which [is] the purpose of the activity". Among the possible status updates, participants mentioned finished (30) , in progress (18) , changed (17) , added (16) , planned (11) , deployed (6) , removed (6) , delivered (2) , and reviewed (2) . P142 gave an example of what such a summary would look like: "I finished story XXX.…”

“…Balancing these two ends of the spectrum is one of the challenges in summarizing development activity. When deciding what information to include in a summary, priority (6) and severity (1) were mentioned as criteria. In addition, the content of a summary depends on other communication channels that developers have already used, as this example from P32 shows: "Well, first of all, I would know medium and low priority errors on production environment of the current projects (if a high priority error occurs we call us via phone)".…”

“…New dependencies (6) are another important item, as described by P144: "Is there any new 3rd party dependency that is added or removed". Developers want to be informed about changes to the design (6) , as stated by P138: "Business level documents change logs.…”

“…Making sense of this plethora of data is becoming harder with every new artifact created. Despite many metrics, software projects continue to be difficult to predict and risky to conduct [6] and finding relevant information within the vast amount of information available is challenging [23].…”