Hackystat can easily collect hundreds of individual raw sensor data regarding your activities during a day, and so it is vital to provide you with abstractions of this data to help you understand and interpret your software development work and its effects. One of the basic Hackystat abstractions is called the Daily Diary. The Daily Diary abstracts the work day into five minute intervals and presents summaries of the raw sensor data with respect to these intervals.
For example, the "Most Active File" abstraction, shown here, presents the file for which the most "StateChange" events were recorded during the five minute period, if any. The "Most Active File" thus represents the file that was edited most often during a five minute interval. In this screen image, the user was editing DailyProjectReviewFile.java for 20 minutes on the morning of October 5, 2004. Between 9:55 and 10:00am, no editing occurred. After that, editing resumed on different files. Hackystat can use the Project definition to display the project(s) that this Most Active File is associated with.
By simply summing the intervals for which a Most Active File exists, we can easily compute values such as the total Active Time for a user for a given day or for a given Project during a given day. It is important to note that Active Time represents only the time spent by developers actively editing files, and not the total time (or "effort") spent on a project.
The Most Active File data provides you with an automatically gathered metric for the time you spend in "active" development, as well as a way to automatically assign your active development during the day to different projects. It can provide a baseline over time that helps you understand what portion of the day you spend in active development and what portion of time you spend doing other kinds of tasks.