A Visual Tool for Supporting Collaborative Code Quality

Organizations have been increasingly relying on software development to manage their business, making it an essential activity. Companies have been using collaborative development environments to speed up their deliveries, resulting in projects tending to be produced by developers from different parts of the world with different cultures. In this context, controlling the software's overall quality by ensuring code quality is a crucial aspect of software development. Software quality can be analyzed based on software parameters like complexity, reusability, testability and maintainability. Such parameters are associated with different group of code metrics which are sets of software measures, providing better insights to developers about their code. In this research we aim to support software developers in better understanding code metrics information. We present a visual tool based on an original method which applies code metrics to an open source collaborative software development environment, grouping them into software product quality parameters. Developers are provided with dashboards and recommendations related to the part of code requiring quality improvement.