Q-Rapids Tool Prototype: Supporting Decision-Makers in Managing Quality in Rapid Software Development

Software quality is an essential competitive factor for the success of software companies today. Increasing the software quality levels of software products and services requires an adequate integration of quality requirements (QRs) in the software life-cycle, which is still scarcely supported in current rapid software development (RSD) approaches. One of the goals of the Q-Rapids (Quality-aware Rapid Software Development) method is providing tool support to decision-makers for QR management in RSD. The Q-Rapids method is based on gathering data from several and heterogeneous sources, to be aggregated into quality-related strategic indicators (e.g., customer satisfaction, product quality) and presented to decision-makers using a highly informative dashboard. The current release of Q-Rapids Tool provides four sets of functionality: (1) data gathering from source tools (e.g. GitLab, Jira, SonarQube, and Jenkins), (2) aggregation of data into three levels of abstraction (metrics, product/process factors, and strategic indicators), (3) visualization of the aggregated data, and (4) navigation through the aggregated data. The tool has been evaluated by four European companies that follow RSD processes.