Application of monitoring support visualization to bug tracking systems

This paper proposes to apply information visualization technologies to the support of monitoring bug update information sent from multiple bug tracking systems. Bug update information managed by bug tracking systems (BTS) is one of text stream data, which continuously generates new data. Therefore, it is difficult for users to watch it all the time. In other words, the task of monitoring stream data inevitably involves breaks of the task, which would lose the context of monitoring. However, to the best of our knowledge, interaction design when involving breaks has not been fully studied yet. The proposed system visualizes the dynamic relationship between bugs with animation, and helps a user grasping the context of monitoring by highlighting updated bugs and the replay of animation for part of the last monitoring time. The effectiveness of the system is evaluated through experiments with test participants. Recent growth of the Web has brought us various kinds of text stream data, such as bulletin board systems (BBS), blogs, and social networking services (SNS). As such data is expected to be important resources for human support robots, this paper would contribute to interaction design of such robots.