Evaluation of Business Intelligence System for Software Development Projects.

Quality assurance (QA) is an important aspect of a software development project. QA activities aim to provide confidence that the quality requirements in a software develop-ment project are fulfilled. Then different QA activities are guided by using various metrics. Different metrics are collected from various tools used during the software development project. The collection process is difficult as the tools do not provide coherent information. The collected data varies as to medium and format when comparing different tools.

Similar difficulties have been encountered in business information management. The abundance of the information has lead to specialized business intelligence systems that allow better use of the business metrics collected from various sources.

This study evaluates whether a business intelligence system is suitable for collecting data from software development tools and process the data to more valuable information. The requirements for the system were gathered from interviews of Qentinel's personnel and experiences of Qentinel's software development projects. The research method used in this study is action research. Parallel to the action research, a literature survey was conducted about quality assurance practices and properties of different business intelli-gence systems.

The results show that the business intelligence system that was evaluated fulfilled the pre set requirements. However, the integration of the software development tools to the business intelligence system was not a complete success. Due to technical difficulties, some of the tools were not integrated to the system. These tools were replaced with similar tools or they were left out from the system. The following seven requirements for the business intelligence system were found: 1) ability to integrate different data sources, 2) ability to combine data from different data sources, 3) ability to form reports, 4) ability to create digital dashboard, 5) ability to publish reports in HTML and PDF format, 6) ability to update the report automatically and 7) ability to record the information from data sources to a database.