Dashboards for continuous monitoring of quality for software product under development

Book chapter, 2014

This chapter contributes with a systematic overview of good examples on how dashboards are used to monitor quality of software products under development – both using multiple measures and a single indicator which combines quality and development progress. In this chapter we extract recommendations for building such dashboards for practitioners by exploring how three companies use dashboards for monitoring and controlling external and internal quality of large software products under development. The dashboards presented by each company contain a number of indicators each, and have different premises due to the domain of the product, its purpose and the organization. We describe a number of common principles behind a set of measures, which address the challenge of quantifying readiness to deliver of software products to their end customers. The experiences presented in this chapter come from multiple case studies at Ericsson, two studies at Volvo Car Corporation (VCC) and one at Saab Electronic Defense Systems in Sweden. All companies have a long experience with software development and have undergone a transition into Agile and Lean software development; however the experience with these new paradigms differs from two to five years depending on the company. The difference in the experience provide a possibility to observe that companies with longer experience tend to focus on using measures to support self-organized teams whereas companies with shorter experience tend to focus on using measures to communicate the status from teams to management.