Evaluating RUP Software Development Processes Through Visualization of Effort Distribution

In this exploratory case study, effort distribution visualizations of industrial software development projects are made in order to assess to what extent patterns can be found that describe the nature of the distribution of effort. The visualization of effort distributions of two rational unified process (RUP) projects are presented and discussed. Data was collected from hour registration systems, visualized in the image of the RUP ´hump´ chart and analyzed for striking features or abnormalities. Senior project team members were confronted with the analysis in order to verify the findings. Although the visualizations show interesting patterns, they cannot be interpreted without context information. The visualizations were evaluated to be a useful addition to project post-mortem analysis.