First Impression of HackyStat

I do not know how much time I spent on this assignment because I did a little of it over the course of couple days. The time I spent each day ranged from 5 minutes to 1 hour. The reason that I didn't finish it in one time is mainly due to the overwhelming documentation. I had bad experience from open source software that has no detailed document, so I was happy to see that HackyStat provides such a fully detailed documentation. However, it seems to be a little tiring to go through all that material in one time.

Anyways, the installation of the eclipse sensor was a no-brainer. The GUI setting made it so easy that I got it working without really reading the tutorial. However, the ant sensor was a little more troublesome. First, it took me a while to figure out the double quotes for the ANT_ARG variable is unnecessary. Then the format of the sensorshell.properties file made me confused since it comes with a .txt entension, which turned out to be unnecessary too. Lastly, I couldn’t find the antSensorTest.build.xml at all, and the website seems to have no information about the whereabout of the file either. Although it took some time, I managed to solve all the problems at the end.

In terms of Three Prime Directives, I think HackyStat has done a pretty good job. It definitely accomplishes a useful task by gathering the software development data from the sensors; the detailed documentation helps an external user to successfully install and use the system, although it still can be improved; lastly, since this is an open source project, an external developer should have no problem to understand and enhance the system.

Overall, I feel the HackyStat is very impressive. However, there are some questions that I concern about the system, such as:
* Can the user change the account password? (there is no way to remember the default one!)
* How does it measure the data for a project? (share a same account would be odd)
* Does the data gather from the sensor really useful? (e.g. opened a file in eclipse doesn't mean much)
* What if there is no internet connection, would the services become not available? (that would suck!)

Hopefully, as my experience with HackyStat grows later in this semester, these questions can be solved.