Snapshot Metrics Are Not Enough: Analyzing Software Repositories with Longitudinal Metrics
Abstract
Software metrics capture information about software development processes and products. These metrics support decision-making, e.g., in team management or dependency selection. However, existing metrics tools measure only a snapshot of a software project. Little attention has been given to enabling engineers to reason about metric trends over time—longitudinal metrics that give insight about process, not just product. In this work, we present PRIME (PRocess MEtrics), a tool to compute and visualize process metrics. The currently-supported metrics include productivity, issue density, issue spoilage, and bus factor. We illustrate the value of longitudinal data and conclude with a research agenda. The tool’s demo video can be watched at https://bit.ly/ase2022-prime. Source code can be found at https://github.com/SoftwareSystemsLaboratory/prime.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Synovic-al:ASE22,
author = {Nicholas M. Synovic and
Matt Hyatt and
Rohan Sethi and
Sohini Thota and
Shilpika and
Allan J. Miller and
Wenxin Jiang and
Emmanuel S. Amobi and
Austin Pinderski and
Konstantin L{\"{a}}ufer and
Nicholas J. Hayward and
Neil Klingensmith and
James C. Davis and
George K. Thiruvathukal},
title = {Snapshot Metrics Are Not Enough: Analyzing Software Repositories with Longitudinal Metrics},
booktitle = {ASE},
pages = {167:1--167:4},
publisher = {{ACM}},
year = {2022},
}