Managing software projects through visualization

This research presents a set of visual approaches to visually represent the software development process and to support software project management by applying visual metaphors and visualization techniques. This thesis presents a set of innovative visualizations which offer an overall view of the project designed from the project manager’s perspective and leave out implementation details. First of all, a complete set of common metrics for project management are stated. Subsequently, the application of visualization techniques and real world metaphors to these metrics results in seven innovative visual proposals, each one with advantages and constraints which are properly evaluated. The results achieved are the graphical representations named Landscape, Japanese garden, Cliff, MetroMap, SoftMagnet, T-Cube and Project Clock.