Hackystat

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Hackystat is an open-source project devoted to collecting software metrics in an unobtrusive manner. It is an example of software telemetry. Hackystat was motivated by the record-keeping overhead associated with methods such as the Personal Software Process, which require programmers to keep extensive logs of their work.

The idea is to use sensors built for specific applications to collect data about the developer's activities. Some of the sensors available are for the Eclipse IDE, JBuilder, Visual Studio.Net, Microsoft Office, Atlassian Jira issue management system, etc. Data that is collected is then used in reports that can be accessed through the Hackystat website.

The website for developer information is at www.hackystat.org.

One of the innovative metrics collected is named "active time." This is the time spent actively editing source files. A Hackystat sensor for a supported IDE would wake-up at regular intervals and record whether or not an edit has been detected.

Active time is a robust means to measure developer effort. This is because almost all IDEs provide an API or some other means to detect edits made to source files.