Hackystat 7.3.317 review

Hackystat is a framework for the automated collection and analysis of software engineering product and process data. Hackystat use

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 1K Developer: Philip Johnson

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Hackystat is a framework for the automated collection and analysis of software engineering product and process data.

Hackystat uses sensors to unobtrusively collect data from development environment tools; there is no chronic overhead on developers to collect product and process data. Hackystat does not tie you to a particular tool, environment, process, or application.

Hackystat project is intended to provide in-process project management support.

Hackystat is in its sixth major architectural release family. The first architectural release family, called the "Spike Solution", was used to explore the feasibility of the approach and to evaluate various component technologies (including JATO, XSL, Ant, JUnit/HttpUnit, Tomcat, Cocoon, and SOAP). Work on this Spike Solution architecture lasted eight months, from May to December, 2001.

In December 2001, we began a major re-implementation of the system in order to provide architectural support for design discoveries made with the Spike Solution. This second architectural release family is called the "Framework Architecture", because it implements package and class-level patterns that facilitate extension of the system via inheritance and composition of existing classes. Unfortunately, the Framework architecture required modification of the hackystat source code to implement new sensors and analysis, and only a single configuration of analyses and sensors can be supported in this architecture.

In November, 2002, we began work on the "SDK" (or "kernelized") architecture release family. This third architectural family decomposes the system into two layers. The first layer is a kernel system which implements the core facilities for data definition, storage, transmission and user interface.

Developers build an actual Hackystat installation by combining the framework with a second layer: a set of plug-in extension modules that define the specific sensor data types, tool sensors, and analyses required to support their development procedures. In the SDK architecture, developers can implement new sensors and analyses without modifying the underlying kernel code, and multiple Hackystat installations can be built with different configurations of analyses and sensors.

In June, 2003, we performed a package restructuring that facilitates the development of third layer, or "application" layer systems. This is the fourth architectural release family, called the "Three Layer" architecture.

After only a month of application layer development, we realized that the build process we developed for the second release family would be woefully inadequate to support the three layer architecture, in which multiple components would be combined into a configuration for release.

So, in August, 2003, we released the fifth architectural release family, called the "Component Architecture", along with extensive new build support including the hackydev web site with daily integration builds.

In July, 2004, we released the sixth architectural family, which provides services to support a "telemetry" based approach to software project monitoring and control. This includes various caching mechanisms, as well as the hackyTelemetry package that includes a telemetry specification language and associated APIs. In this architecture, telemetry support becomes a "low level" feature of the system.

What's New in This Release:
A new modular, docbook-based documentation providing configuration-specific User, Administrator, and Developer guides.
Improvements to hackyApp_BuildAnalysis.
Improvements to hackyInstaller.
The usual uku million bug fixes