Non-distracting, Continuous Collection of Software Development Process Data

Knowledge management initiatives often fail when companies lack time and resources to focus on the meaning, implications, capturing and sharing of organizational knowledge management. This problem becomes even more severe when dealing with software development companies: software is invisible, which makes it difficult to reason and to communicate about it. It is hard to understand status, e.g., what the current state of the project is, which difficulties exist, and which problems might be in front of us. This is why we need measurement to obtain data about software, how it is created, and how it is used. This chapter presents non-distracting, automatic measurement, which is based on the extension of code editors or the instrumentation of source code of products, to log how developers or users are interacting with the software. We present two examples how data was collected, analyzed and interpreted. The here discussed methods describe our experiences in developing systems that support software development teams to collect and organize knowledge about their software development process based on non-disturbing, automatic data collection technologies, dashboards, and the Goal-Question-Metric approach.