Customized Analytics Software : Investigating efficient development of an application

Abstract: Google Analytics is the most widely used web traffic analytics program in the world with a wide array of functionality which serve several different purposes for its users. However the cost of training employees in the usage of Google Analytics can be expensive and time consuming due to the generality of the software. The purpose of this thesis is to explore an alternative solution to hav- ing employees learn the default Google Analytics interface and thus possibly re- ducing training expenses. A prototype written in the Java programming lan- guage is developed which implements the MVC and facade software patterns for the purpose of making the development process more efficient. It contains a feature for retrieving custom reports from Google Analytics using Google’s Core Reporting API in addition to two web pages are integrated into the proto- type using the Google Embed API. In the result the prototype is used along with the software estimation method COCOMO to make an estimation of the amount of effort required to develop a similar program. This is done by counting the prototype’s source lines of code manually, following the guidelines given by the COCOMO manual, and then implementing the result in the COCOMO estima- tion formula. The count of lines of code for the entire prototype is 567 and the count which considers reused code is 466. The value retrieved from the formula is 1.61±0.14 person months for the estimation of the entire program and 1.31± 0.16 for a program with reused code. The conclusion of the thesis is that the res- ult from the estimation has several weaknesses and further research is necessary in order to improve the accuracy of the result.