The Stracker analysis tool allows software project managers to (1) compare their project's metrics to other successful projects, and (2) forecast how their project's metrics will evolve over time. Stracker analyzes historical metrics data using techniques like linear regression and time-series forecasting to predict future values and identify correlations. It was deployed by Softeam R&D to forecast metrics for their projects, helping project managers better plan resources.

1. Stracker analysis tool & Metric
forecasting in Softeam
Softeam R&D, Alessandra Bagnato, Antonin Abhervé, Kaïs Chaabouni, Amin Boudeffa
University of Bucharest, Alin Stefanescu & Constantin Cir
MIW - Measure Industrial Workshop 2019, Paris,
TelecomParisTech, 28th February 2019

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MEASURE
Business scenario
Is my software
project ok...?
A software project manager wants to know:
1. How her project compares with other
successful projects
2. How the project will evolve (to better
plan the resources)

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MEASURE
The Stracker analysis tool
▪ STRACKER: Increase the quality of software development by
- tracking and suggesting values of various software metrics
during the software development process.
- It also includes a module that predicts future metric values
based on values ​​recorded so far.
- It will try estimate the gain in cost brought by the monitoring
tool by calculating the difference between the cost of solving the
issue at early stage thanks to the monitoring tool and the
estimated cost to discover and fix the issue later. This estimation
of the cost of fixing the issue later would assume that the issue
had not been discovered yet and the evolution of the quality
indicators will be predicted using a forecasting tool.

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MEASURE
Business Question 1: Compare with
successful projects
▪ Business Question 1: How a given project compares with
other similar projects? (from metrics point of view)
▪ Technical Solution: historical data analysis conducted during
a period of 6 months between May and the October 2018
- Example of findings: Metrics peaks that indicate a sudden
increase of issues at particular weeks. These events are
observed in several metrics and can be explained by important
product releases preceding these dates.

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MEASURE
Business Question 1: Compare with
successful projects
▪ The link between the collected measures and the product
backlog incident history indicates that certain measures can
help predict incidents if they reach threshold values that
trigger incidents.
▪ This allow us to estimate the gain in cost of fixing the incidents
earlier when the threshold values had been reached.
▪ We manually find threshold points and estimated costs.
Monitoring of Modelio development process with the Measure
Platform e.g Estimate
Remediation
Cost with
Measure
Platform
1 day for 3
peoples = 3
m/d
Remediation
Cost with
project
backlog
5 day for 3
peoples = 15
m/d

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MEASURE
Business Question 1: Compare with
successful projects with Strucker
▪ Business Question 1: How a given project compares with
other similar projects? (from metrics point of view)
▪ Technical Solution (Stracker Stracker web application tool):
▪ pick a set of previous (successful) software projects
▪ check correlation of different software metrics
▪ build a correlation model (using linear regression)
▪ predict metric1 values based on metric2 values
▪ compare predicted values with current values of metric1

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MEASURE
Correlation on Github public projects
▪ select top open-source
Python projects in Github
(and also internal projects
from Bitdefender)
▪ check their SonarQube
metrics (lines of codes,
comments, code smells,
violations, functions, etc)
▪ build correlation models
using linear regression

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MEASURE
Example - lines of code and comments
correlation model
Github projectssoftware project
learn
# lines of code
# current comments # predicted comments
MEASURE
compare

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MEASURE
Stracker correlation and comparison

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MEASURE
▪ Business Question 2: How the project will evolve – predict
metrics (to better plan the resources)
▪ Technical Solution
▪ collect previous values of a given metric for the project
▪ apply expertise of Project manager
▪ forecast futures values of the metric
Business Question 2: Forecast metrics
without Stracker

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MEASURE
Business Question 2: Forecast metrics
with Stracker
▪ Business Question 2: How the project will evolve (to better
plan the resources)
▪ Technical Solution (Stracker tool):
▪ collect previous values of a given metric for the project
▪ apply time-series forecasting algorithms (ARiMA)
▪ forecast futures values of the metric

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MEASURE
Example – forecast comments
forecasting
algorithm
software project
forecasted # comments
MEASURE
historical data on # comments

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MEASURE
Stracker forecasting
forecasted values

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MEASURE
Deployment of the Measure platform in
Modelio development team

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MEASURE
Metric forecasting in Softeam (1/2)
▪ Softeam wanted to get certain metric forecasting. The figures
below show the data forecasted by Stracker based on
production data for Softeam.
Forecasting for an architectural metric Forecasting for a bug remediation effort metric

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MEASURE
Metric forecasting in Softeam (2/2)
Forecasting for a security metric

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MEASURE
Deploy Stracker
▪ Stracker from git: https://github.com/CostiCTI/Stracker
- Start the program:
- Start Elasticsearch
- Start Sonarqube
- Start Stracker: in the folder Stracker, start app.py (python app.py)
- The application will run on http://localhost:5000
▪ Use it in the MEASURE platform: https://github.com/ITEA3-
Measure/MeasurePlatform

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MEASURE
Contacts
Alessandra Bagnato
Softeam R&D
alessandra.bagnato@softeam.fr
MEASURE Web Site:
http://measure.softeam-rd.eu/