Analysis of Test Log Information through Interactive Visualizations

A fundamental activity to achieve software quality is software testing, whose results are typically stored in log files. These files contain the richest and more detailed source of information for developers trying to understand failures and identify their potential causes. Analyzing and understanding the information presented in log files, however, can be a complex task, depending on the amount of errors and the variety of information. Some previously proposed tools try to visualize test information, but they have limited interaction and present a single perspective of such data. This paper presents ASTRO, an infrastructure that extracts information from a number of log files and presents it in multi-perspective interactive visualizations that aim at easing and improving the developers' analysis process. A study carried out with practitioners from 3 software test factories indicated that ASTRO helps to analyze information of interest, with less accuracy in tasks that involved assimilation of information from different perspectives. Based on their difficulties, participants also provided feedback for improving the tool.