Studying Micro-Processes in Software Development Stream

Abstract

In this paper we propose a new streaming technique to study software development. As we observed software development consists of a series of activities such as edit, compilation, testing, debug and deployment etc. All these activities contribute to development stream, which is a collection of software development activities in time order. Development stream can help us replay and reveal software development process at a later time without too much hassle. We developed a system called Zorro to generate and analyze development stream at Collaborative Software Development Laboratory in University of Hawaii. It is built on the top of Hackystat, an in-process automatic metric collection system developed in the CSDL. Hackystat sensors continuously collect development activities and send them to a centralized data store for processing. Zorro reads in all data of a project and constructs stream from them. Tokenizers are chained together to divide development stream into episodes (micro iteration) for classification with rule engine. In this paper we demonstrate the analysis on Test-Driven Development (TDD) with this framework.