Brugge Blog

Dashboards are in. Dashboards are happening. It’s what automation is supposed to be about: to be the crowbar against an accumulation of feedback. Getting data is the first step, being able to interpret it is where the action starts.

I’ve wanted to have an all-in-one-page view of a project’s metrics for years now, ever since seeing the Maven 1.x dashboard plugin. And now, thanks to the inspiration from a blog post by Andy Glover and the leverage of a language like Groovy, I’ve managed to pull one together, and have added it to the latest release of Glean.

If you’re already running Glean, adding the dashboard is a couple of steps.

• If you don’t have Groovy yet, download and install it
• Get Glean v1.2 and the dashboard-1.0 packages and unpack them
• Add this line to your project’s feedback.properties file:

  create.dashboard = true

That’s it. Run your Glean build and you should have another link at the bottom of your feedback summary page to the dashboard page. The look should be something like this.

The dashboard code will look for the output of various tools that Glean runs, and grab one or more important metrics from the ones it finds. It creates an XML file of that data and then the Glean script transforms it into an HTML page; if you want to change the look of it, you can drop in an XSLT or CSS of your own.

The metrics have links to the full report where they came from, so you can drill down into the ones that grab your attention. And when you want to show someone the state of your codebase in terms of metrics, send them the link to the dashboard page. (If you’ve got the QALab tool turned on for your builds, then you’ve got historical data on some of these numbers too.)

No more need to guess at what your codebase is like, or say its too hard to get the numbers.