The idea for this Bachelor’s thesis came from Digia, which develops Qt, a cross-platform application and UI framework for software developers, together with the Qt Project, a meritocratic consensus-based open source developer community. The main objective of this thesis was to improve the visualization and communication of the Qt quality by creating a web portal to collect and display metrics on required Qt process areas, focusing on continuous integration. Raw results are available from many process areas already, but the problem is that the results are not very valuable without better visualization. In addition, manual work is required to report some key information from the results. The Qt teams in Digia and the global Qt developer community, i.e. those individuals and teams that develop the Qt library components and the Qt tools, are the target audience.

Requirements to the web portal solution included a specification of some key metrics, recommendation to use open source solutions, to enable anyone in Qt developer community to modify the content or create new, and to document the design and implementation. The work started by studying and analyzing some of the most promising solutions for web, database and report development against the portal requirements and needed competence as well as against the existing server environment and current processes and practices used in the Qt Project. The system architecture consists of the report builder as the front-end, and the parser and the database as the back-end. The selected technical solutions were Perl for the parser, MySQL for the database, and HTML, CSS, PHP and AJAX for the report builder. The thesis project used the same contribution practices and tools that are used for the actual Qt software implementation.

The result was the Qt metrics system which was launched and taken into public use as planned. The system is running on the existing Qt testresults server on the qt-project.org domain. The functionality as well as the guidelines to further develop the system was documented into Qt Project wiki. The system was utilized already during the implementation phase by the key users in their daily operations. Received and requested user feedback, both before and after the launch, has been positive. The development proposals to the Qt metrics system are related to adding new content and functionality to the current metrics page, adding new metrics pages for some identified process areas, and improving the overall performance of the system still further. The thesis project itself was kept on schedule, and the effort was well under control.