PIVoT: Project insights and Visualization Toolkit

An in-process view into a software development project´s health is critical for its success. However, in services organizations, a typical software development team employs a heterogeneous set of tools based on client requirements through the different phases of the software project. The use of disparate tools with non-compatible outputs makes it very difficult to extract one coherent picture of the project´s health and status. Existing project management tools either work at the process layer and rely on manually entered information, or are activity centric, without a holistic view. In this paper, we present PIVoT, a metric-based framework for automated, non-invasive, and in-process data collection and analysis in heterogeneous software project environments, that provides rich, multi-dimensional insights into the project´s health and trajectory. Here, we introduce the different analyses, insights and metrics, and discuss their usage in typical software projects.