How to monitor developers work data in Eclipse?

Question

I am working on my bachelor thesis (this is my first research project) and trying to evaluate different possibilites to monitor a developers work during a day, aggregate it and illustrate it later. For this purpose, I defined some metrics, I want to measure (they might change over time and there might come more).

My questions are related to the monitors. To start, I have decided to monitor the developers work (only) within Eclipse (and add a TFS implementation later):

• Work Items: I want to know how many work items the developer solved, edited and created. If possible, I want to access the data from MyLin, because multiple different task/bug-trackers can be used (Bugzilla, Mantis, etc.). Unfortunately, I am not sure, if this is possible somehow?

• IDE-stuff: (To start), I want to count the number of selects and edits in the code and probably also the number of clicks a developer made within the IDE. I read, that I can create listeners on Eclipse and get the data. Is this right and does anyone know a nice tutorial on that topic?

• Source Code Management: To track a developers work, I need to get the developers source code changes (commits). For SVN, GIT and CVS, there are multiple APIs, which I may access with Java or also via webrequests. But before I start that, I wanted to ask you, if someone knows a plug-in or something where I can access the commits from different version control systems? What is the easiest way to do something like that?

I also have a couple of other things, I am going to measure... My aim is to aggregate the data within an Eclipse plugin and then send it the server for the visualisation.

I am not necessarily looking for fully implemented solutions, but more for hints, tutorials, tips, your opinions and probably also questions and propositions!

thank you!

Answer 1

You can try out with rabbit plugins for eclipse to track the time spent on it. It has different trackers to record the statistics about different commands executed, duration of the perspective or views used, time spent on editors etc.. And this plugins has a view to see all the statistics collected. have a look at the following link:

http://code.google.com/p/rabbit-eclipse/

Answer 2

Some of the metrics you want are produced by Hudson/Jenkins plugins as a starting point you could look at how those plugins produce those metrics. Same applies for the Eclipse metrics find existing plugins which manipulate or consume some of the metrics you want and use that as a starting point - since most of them are OpenSource.