Hey Austin,
You have two thoughts in here: (1) source code collection and (2) a better
build process for hackystat
(1) source code collection
So I was wondering if Hackystat functionality could be extended to collect
source code snippets that a developer is hacking on.
If your development process spans a couple of hours, then you could collect
source code by simply committing the working code. By doing this you can
definitely revisit the changes later on. I personally think checking out
revisions of a file is easier to do in subversion. In fact, if you guys
install ViewCVS then you can browse the revisions through a web browser.
For example:
http://svn.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/maven/maven-1/plugins/trunk/jira/src/main/org/apache/maven/jira/JiraDownloader.java
On the other hand, I have no idea what you could do if you can't commit the
code that often. But, it would definitely be cool if you could "play back"
your hacking session. Not sure this is a job for Hackystat though.
(2) a better build process for hackystat
And maybe the GUI creation process won't be as painful when the new build
system is in.
It would be cool to be able to compile the code that you need to compile.
For example, hackyInstaller could care less about DailyProjectFileMetric,
but you probably still compile and test that each and every time you want
to check the size of a button. Another example: when developing sensors do
we really need to have Tomcat running?
Of course, I still believe in a freshStart junitAll the whole configuration
before committing.
thanks, aaron
At 06:02 PM 10/12/2005, you wrote:
So I was thinking about Hackystat again (It just sucks you in!) and
was wondering if Hackystat functionality could be extended to collect
source code snippets that a developer is hacking on. The reason why I
started thinking about source code collection was the way I created
the usermaps GUI. I was having problems getting it to display
properly and basically ended up following this process:
1. Write some code, build it, view it.
2. Re-write the code, build it and view it again.
3. Rinse and repeat.
After long periods of time trying to get the GUI to look how I wanted,
I ended up re-writing the same code. For example I would move buttons
back to locations that they have already been or resized components
back to a previously used dimension. Because of the mass amounts of
code re-writing, I would waste time waiting for the build process to
finish only to see that the result is again a view that I do not wish
to see.
I was thinking that if a sensor could collect code snippets you were
working on, the developer would be able view them later and minimize
the re-writing of the same code. After talking in the lab today with
Hongbing, Julie, and James, the approach turned into a comparison of
code snippets to the actual snapshot of the GUI.
This would be helpful since the majority of my work on HackyInstaller
deals with getting the GUI to look just right. I don't know if
Hackystat would be able to collect snippets of code because code
changes so much during the hacking session. And maybe the GUI
creation process won't be as painful when the new build system is in.
Anyways, just a thought.
Cheers,
austen
