Finish milestone to DPD

It is a critical week of the hackystat issue project that the functionalities from issue sensor up to DailyProjectData are ready to release, along with updated documentation found in
Ant Task Reference
SensorDataTypeSpecification
DPD API

The new build of Hackystat including these feature should be release very soon. And it will be deployed in our daily hudson build to start gathering issue data.

Next setp is to implement Telemetry analysis. Then put all these things into Project Browser, including Software ICU of course.

DPD almost done

Issue analysis for DailyProjectData is almost done. The process is quite straight forward with the existed analyzes as examples. There is nothing interesting to mention in my opinion. It contains a total count of open issue on the dpd data for convenient.

When coding for DPD, I actually found some bugs in issue sensor. When testing the sensordata parser, I realize I can makeup some issue instance as CSV for testing. It should be used in tests for issue sensor as well.

Just keep working.

Moving step forward

After a week's waiting, my little MacBook Pro had come back home on Sunday safe and sound, did not lose a single piece of useful data. As soon as I got him back, I start finishing up the issue sensor to ready for commit.

After a serious consideration, I decide to discard the RSS feed as data source completely, because firstly it does not provide much more useful information than extract data from issue summary table, secondly the RSS feed service seems more unstable than the issue tracking system,which make the sensor unstable as well, and thirdly it make the code more complex and hard to validate data completeness. My opinion is, if the user really don't want to miss a single update information, just run the sensor as often as he like.

I also found it kind of hard to test the issue sensor, because it is almost impossible to have a fully controllable and repeatable test environment. The content of Google Project Hosting will keep changing. For current state, I test it by run it twice, and make sure the first run generate some issue data, and the second run did not detect any changes. The better way to exam if the sensor working properly is to actually use it. So my job this week is to work on DailyProjectData to use the issue sensordata to generate issue DPD.

Commit Early, Commit Often

I just get a painful lesson of the Commit Early, Commit Often principle. The thing is, my laptop (MacBook Pro bought at 07) died on Sunday. I brought it to Apple store and lucky I can get it fix for free, which will take 1 to 2 weeks. However, the code of the new version of issue sensor is still lying on its hard drive, and the data is not guarantee to be undamaged. That means my work for 3 weeks are gone, at least for the coming week or two. In fact, functional code is finished already. I was just waiting for completing the unit tests before commit the code. I am now so regret that I did not commit the code early.