Hackstat : A Framework for Software Development Process Data

Philip Johnson tells me by email of Hackystat:

[A]n open source framework for collection, analysis, visualization, interpretation, annotation, and dissemination of software development process and product data....

Hackystat aspires to be the "Apache" of software engineering measurement systems: open source, standalone, scalable, extensible, and platform and technology neutral.

Our current thrust with Hackystat is "Collective Intelligence for Software Developers", and we are thinking about things like annotable Simile/Timeline representations, mashups with Facebook and Twitter, and other ways to create a kind of collaborative sense-making between man and machine so that metrics can be reliably and efficiently refined into actionable knowledge.

I've long been a fan of metrics, but traditionally programmers have resisted the introduction of metrics due to a (probably reasonable) fear that simplistic measurements would be tied to performance reviews, e.g., "Gee, you didn't add nearly as many lines of code to the system as Bob. No raise for you!"

Hopefully, the time of such fears has passed and Hackystat or a similar project will start giving us some of that missing data.