Hackystat Developer Services
Introduction
Hackystat is a large project that provides automated software metrics collection and analysis infrastructure. The system contains over 300,000 lines of code. As the number of developers and the intensity of development effort go up, the coordination problem gets significant.
I designed and implemented a set of services to provide better support for the development of Hackystat. It consists of a web front end and a background service. The front end provides centralized access to design documentation, latest snapshot of source code, integration build reports, bug tracking services, etc.; while the background service initiates integration build, runs unit tests, and collects software metrics every night automatically.
The system has been in production deployment in Collaborative Software Development Lab (CSDL) since August 2003. The manager likes it because it provides detailed up-to-date status report of the project. The developers like it because it synchronizes their development effort.
Link
Technical details
The web front end is written using JSP (Java Server Pages) and Apache Struts (a popular model-view-controller infrastructure). The back end utilizes an in-house customized version of CruiseControl. The system build reports are presented on the web using XSLT (XML style sheet transformation).