Software Quality Assurance Analytics: Enabling Software Engineers to Reflect on QA Practices

Software engineers employ a variety of approaches to ensure the quality of software systems, including software testing, modern code review, automated static analysis, build automation, and continuous integration. Previous research has shown that software engineers lack situational awareness about the quality assurance (QA) practices in their projects. We propose software quality assurance analytics to help software engineers become aware of their QA usage, and reflect upon it. We have developed a prototype quality assurance analytics dashboard coined RepoInsights that provides both a global overview and a comparative aspect of the different QA practices. Through a qualitative study involving 14 participants who have completed an assignment using our RepoInsights dashboard, we elicit their perspective on quality assurance analytics. We observe that the dashboard has enabled the software engineers to reflect on the QA practices of software projects. Additionally, we distill a set of recommendations for future quality assurance analytics.