Onboard: A Data-Driven Agile Software Development Collaboration Tool

Scrum is an agile software development process with a balance between schedule and flexibility, which empowers software development teams with the ability to work efficiently and respond to changes quickly at the same time. Each step in the software development process can generate tons of data, which can further facilitate team and project management and improve development efficiency if these data are captured, analyzed, displayed and fed back. However, these data are commonly scattered and under-utilized because project management and source code management are separated in existing software development management toolbox. To promote data-driven agile software development process with Scrum at its core, we create Onboard, an agile software development collaboration tool based on cloud service, which, by associating Git commits with tasks, creatively incorporates agile process management, source code management and project management into one integrated service for software development teams. Onboard supports end-to-end management of the whole software life cycle, thus it can collect all the data generated throughout the development process and extract valuable information. This paper first introduces the design principle and structure of Onboard, and then gives a comprehensive survey of data visualization and analysis applied in Onboard. In the survey, we propose solutions to a series of related problems on two topics: how to fully utilize the data generated to improve agile development process and how to evaluate the contribution of a team member. In the final analysis, the paper provides topics that need further research.