JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

Continuous Integration (CI) is a practice that is used to automate the software build and its test for every code integration to a shared repository. CI runs thousands of test scripts every day in a software organization. Every test produces data which can be test results logs such as errors, warnings, performance measurements and build metrics. This data volume tends to grow at unprecedented rates for the builds that are produced in the Continuous Integration (CI) system. The amount of the integrated test results data in CI grows over time. Visualizing and manipulating the real time and dynamic data is a challenge for the organizations. The 2D visualization of big data has been actively in use in software industry. Though the 2D visualization has numerous advantages, this study is focused on the 3D representation of CI big data visualization and its advantage over 2D visualization. Interactivity with the data and system, and accessibility of the data anytime, anywhere are two important requirements for the system to be usable. Thus, the study focused in creating a 3D user interface to visualize CI system data in 3D web environment. The three-dimensional user interface has been studied by many researchers who have successfully identified various advantages of 3D visualization along with various interaction techniques. Researchers have also described how the system is useful in real world 3D applications. But the usability of 3D user interface in visualizations in not yet reached to a desirable level especially in software industry due its complex data. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the use of 3D data visualization that could help the CI system users of a beneficiary organization in interpreting and exploring CI system data. The study focuses on designing and creating a 3D user interface for providing a more effective and usable system for CI data exploration. Design science research framework is chosen as a suitable research method to conduct the study. This study identifies the advantages of applying 3D visualization to a software system data and then proceeds to explore how 3D visualization could help users in exploring the software data through visualization and its features. The results of the study reveal that the 3D visualization help the beneficiary organization to view and compare multiple datasets in a single screen space, and to see the holistic view of large datasets, as well as focused details of multiple datasets of various categories in a single screen space. Also, it can be said from the results that the 3D visualization help the beneficiary organization CI team to better represent big data in 3D than in 2D.