Master Thesis MSTR-2023-62

BibliographyBhawsinka, Nistha: Change tracking and observability for complex software development.
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology, Master Thesis No. 62 (2023).
48 pages, english.
Abstract

The complexity involved in the wide range of software products that are developed around the globe varies in many aspects. It is often easier to manage small projects because of less development tools involved, but for larger projects it can get overwhelming fairly quickly. Having an option to view all the important parts of a development process at one place can help in such complex scenarios. The objective of this study is to make this process simpler by introducing an observability solution for the development teams. The work revolves around two use cases, one from IBM having more than 250 repositories managed by a small group of developers. And the other one is preCICE, which is an open-source project with around 50 repositories. Both the use cases have their respective needs which are recorded by surveying the developers. The solution developed is intended to be generic so that it can be used in other projects in the future. This accounts to the pressing need of creating a reusable solution. Major components of the proposed solution include a Grafana dashboard with custom scripts written in Python. It is a client server architecture, shipped as docker images for portability purposes. One of the key aspects of this study was to keep the developers informed and understand their needs. This helped while designing questions for all the surveys that were conducted with them as subjects. Results of those surveys acted as a knowledge base while planning the solution. The work also contributes in streamlining the software development process in complex projects by reducing the mental effort and development time of the developers. There is an added advantage of better collaboration with such an overview of the project. It will allow the new developers to get familiarized with the organizational pulse and make contributions to the source code in a more informed manner. The results showcase how projects with different level of complexity and perspectives can benefit from such a solution.

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Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems, Simulation Software Engineering
Superviser(s)Uekermann, Jun.-Prof. Benjamin; Desal, Ishaan; Schlameuß, Christoph
Entry dateFebruary 20, 2024
   Publ. Computer Science