An empirical investigation on the visualization of temporal uncertainties in software engineering project planning

The success of software projects depends on the ability of a human planner to understand the relationships of tasks and their temporal uncertainty and hence the visualization thereof. In this paper we report on an empirical study that compares the performance of two techniques to visualize task relationships and temporal uncertainties: traditional "best-practice" PERT charts and recently introduced PlanningLines. Main results of the study are: (a) while PERT charts are well suited for reading single attributes, PlanningLines better support users in judging temporal task uncertainty; (b) both experiment rounds shows consistent results regarding the strengths and limitations of the techniques. Overall, these results suggest that a combination of PERT charts and PlanningLines has the potential to significantly improve the planning support of project managers and software engineers.