Hi, Austen,
Those are all legitimate questions. Active time and build time are not
the same, and there is no overlap between them.
Active time is computed through ide buffer change and 5 min abstraction.
I guess you know the details, so I won't repeat them here. My personal
experience is that active time always understate my coding effort by
50%. In other words, if my active time is 4 hours, I am usually working
8 hours. But these numbers depend highly on one's coding habit, and your
experience might be different.
Build sensor collects both build start time stamp and build end time
stamp, from which you can compute the total build time. Actually, the
build reduction function already does that for you. You can invoke
telemetry analysis yourself and see your build time for each day. But,
again, build time may have different meaning to different people. I
alway wait for the build to complete doing nothing else. But Aaron told
me that he had the habit of kicking of local build frequently, and
continue coding while the system is being built and tested.
I find it always good to use extra caution when interpreting effort
related metrics. There are too many things you need to consider, and I
believe no single number is a good proximate for all cases.
I am not sure you are aware or not that almost all test cases can still
be executed inside ecclipse, except that you need to set up some
environment variables for each test case. I don't have those variables
right now at home, but I can tell you next week when I am in office.
By the ways, my main development platforms are windows boxes, and they
run fast. Eclipse runs sluggish on my linux box.
Cheers,
Cedric
Austen Itsuji Ito wrote:
Tonight I was thinking about how long Hackystat takes to build locally,
(I think Professor Johnson did something to me so that I would think
about Hackystat on a Friday night) and was wondering how the ant build
sensor collects data. I know that Hackystat collects data on how many
times you invoke a build, but does the sensor collect information on how
long the build takes?
The reason why I am asking this question is because I was wondering how
much of Julie and my time was spent waiting for the build process to
finish before we actually test our changes. I wanted to see how much
time was spent building/testing as compared to earlier hackyInstaller
development where changes could be tested immediately in Eclipse.
I know that lots of time is saved by integrating hackyInstaller into
Hackystat, but I was just curious to see if our active time was an
indication that we spent 15 hours building and only 5 hours hacking away.
I know for a fact that Julie's system would take a very long time just
to run a "ant -q cleanAll quickStart", where my laptop would build much
faster. I believe this was due to my development being done on linux,
where Julie is running Windows XP. If the active time does include how
long a build takes, then perhaps Julie didn't work double my hours ;p
Thanks and sorry if the question I am asking has been brought up before.
Cheers,
austen
