Requirement and Design Trade-offs in Hackystat: An In-Process Software Engineering Measurement and Analysis System

For five years, the Hackystat project has incremen tally developed and evaluated a generic framework for in process software engineering measurement and analysis (ISEMA). At least five other independent ISEMA system development projects have been initiated during this time, indicating growing interest and investment in this approach by the software engineering community. This pa per presents 12 important requirement and design trade offs made in the Hackystat system, some of their implications for organizations wishing to introduce ISEMA, and six directions for future research and development. The three goals of this paper are to: (1) help potential users of ISEMA systems to better evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of current and future systems, (2) help potential developers of ISEMA systems to better understand some of the important requirement and design tradeoffs that they must make, and (3) help accelerate progress in ISEMA by identifying promising directions for future research and development.