Innovations in Visualization

STRATOS

Bon Adriel Aseniero
Tiffany Wun
David Ledo
Guenther Ruhe
Anthony Tang
Sheelagh Carpendale

STRATOS: Using Visualization to Support Decisions in Strategic Software Release Planning

Abstract

Software is typically developed incrementally and released in stages. Planning these releases involves deciding which features of the system should be implemented for each release. This is a complex planning process involving numerous trade-offs—constraints and factors that often make decisions difficult. Since the success of a product depends on this plan, it is important to understand the trade-offs between different release plans in order to make an informed choice. We present STRATOS, a tool that simultaneously visualizes several software release plans. The visualization shows several attributes about each plan that are important to planners. Multiple plans are shown in a single layout to help planners find and understand the trade-offs between alternative plans. We evaluated our tool via a qualitative study and found that STRATOS enables a range of decision-making processes, helping participants decide on which plan is most optimal.

Poster

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Publications

Bon Adriel Aseniero. STRATOS: The Design of Visualization to Support Decision-making in Software Release Planning. Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, December, 2014.
Bon Adriel Aseniero, Tiffany Wun, David Ledo, Guenther Ruhe, Anthony Tang and Sheelagh Carpendale. STRATOS: Using Visualization to Support Decisions in Strategic Software Release Planning. In CHI '15: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (Seoul, South Korea), pages 1479-1488, Apr, 2015. PDF Paper