DevCreek

Testing activity by a developer

Test run ticker

Live display in Eclipse

Summary on website

Shareable fingerprint of user or project testing behaviour

System wide live summary on website

Build summary report

Deployment Summary Report

Performance - HTTP Sessions

System - Historical activity

Issue/Bugzilla activity

Code duplication

Performance diagnosis

Code coverage

Code dependency

Code complexity

Names

DevCreek was a metrics gathering, analytics, and sharing platform that I worked on at Intelliware for a few years starting in 2006.

It all started with a sketch from Kent Beck for real-time feedback during a test-driven development session for developers. As an instrument it would reveal their development patterns and provide feedback to guide their personal development process. To this end we first created a simple Eclipse plugin to show test executions and whether the test passed or failed. This stream of testing data could then by sent to a server as XML to provide a longer term perspective on an individuals testing and to share that amongst all the members of a team.

Over time this grew into TestCreek and then DevCreek. The server supported an extensible XML representation of events, and this grew to support more types of events over time, such as deployments and builds, and so on. The number of clients, or agents, increased from Eclipse to collecting test executions from maven and and other Java sources, to tests written in ruby, to other software analytics libraries.

API	Agent	Notes
Bugzilla	Issue Tracking	Bugzilla
Code Coverage	DevCreek Eclipse plug-in	Java/JUnit, Ruby
Code Metrics	Eclipse Code Metrics	Eclipse based Java code metrics
Code Metrics	Maven	Maven based Java code metrics
Community	DevCreek Eclipse plug-in
Dependency	Maven	Maven component and Java dependencies
Performance	Performance	Java and Spring based framework for collecting runtime performance data
Unit Test	DevCreek Eclipse plug-in	Java/JUnit with EclEmma
Unit Test	Maven	Java build tests
Unit Test	Ruby	Native Ruby

The system was implemented from a basic record that could be extended by any agent without needing to update the server code. Here is an example sharing the current task with a team.

<record>
    <community.message>Working on Documentation</community.message>
    <core.principal>DGJ</core.principal>
    <core.project>Example</core.project>
    <core.sessionId>75bb3da-72cd13e1-6045e566-60f4f98b-d0ecebdc</core.sessionId>
    <core.timeStamp>1173661254518</core.timeStamp>
    <core.timeZoneOffset>-14400000</core.timeZoneOffset>
    <core.type>community.SendMessage</core.type>
</record>

DevCreek 2006 - 2007