Brugge Blog

Nobody really trusts a 1.0 release, but you have to start somewhere to get the tires kicked. To that end, I’ve updated Glean with fixes for a couple of the tool scripts and added some new tools, and am cutting that as a 1.1 release. No need to put off using it any more.

The new tools supported are ones that I think folks will find useful:

• StatCVS, to give you the same kind of repository activity analysis as StatSVN
• DocBook Doclet, a tool I stumbled across as one way turning your Javadoc in to a nice looking PDF document. There are many, many options that you can use to control the doclet, and this first release of a script for it is just a starting point. If it isn’t flexible enough for what you need, let me know.
• QALab, to give you the ability to track and graph metrics over time from analysis tools such as PMD, Checkstyle and Cobertura.

I’m most excited by QALab for a couple of reasons. For one, it is a way to get trend information out of ongoing development data, something extremely important for knowing both where you are and where you are going. We’re using it now at the client I’m at so that we can start building up information about quality metrics for a project that is going to be around and growing for quite a while.

It is also an example of how Glean can provide one set of feedback to drive another. Besides being a basic script for QALab, the new script will automatically work with whatever tool output it knows about that you have run. For instance, if you are already having Glean run PMD and Checkstyle, then you just have to add “qalab” to the list and it will pick up the PMD and Checkstyle data. If you later add in Cobertura for your test coverage, QALab will start picking that data up too. This is one of the things that I hoped Glean would get to, having tools that take advantage of the framework and knit pieces of it together.

In that same theme of getting information out of the collective results, I’m still looking for good ways to put together an “at a glance” summary of the different metrics. Andy Glover has a start on something like this built in Groovy, and I think something like that could plug in to Glean pretty easily. I’m also going to look at XRadar and Hackystat, but at first glance those are a bit more involved to set up.

I’ve also had a couple of suggestions to integrate Glean with continuous integration servers like CruiseControl or Hudson so that you could see the results from within their consoles. I haven’t used Hudson yet, so I’m not sure what’s involved there, but I’m well acquainted with CruiseControl and adding another panel to the reporting webapp shouldn’t be too hard.

I’m also looking at putting the project on a hosting server to make communication and access easier, but until then please continue to send feedback to me, or leave a note here.