While the Daily Diary provides information on the "sequence" of process and product data collected during a given day, the Daily Project Details command provides a summary of the overall process and product data for a given day.
Figure 4.33, “ Daily Project Details for StackyHack on March 14, 2006 ” illustrates the "summary" section of the Daily Project Details command for the StackyHack Project on March 14, 2006.
The Daily Project Details analysis begins with a summary section, where each row contains a summary of the data for one kind of measure. In certain cases, the row shows two values: the total obtained over all developers in the Project, as well as a subtotal gathered from your data alone. For example, the Active Time metric shows both the total and your individual amount. However, the File Metric summary line does not show this breakdown, since it is not generally interesting to know who actually invoked the sensor to gather the structural metrics.
The remaining parts of the Daily Project Details analysis page provides "Drill Downs" into each of the metrics represented by a single row in the summary section. Figure 4.34, “ Daily Project Details for StackyHack ” illustrates a few of the "drill downs" available in the Daily Project Details command.
Most Drill Downs provide a breakdown of the summary information by individual developers and/or by top-level workspaces. Since the StackyHack Project is quite simple, consisting of a single developer and a single top-level Workspace, these particular drill downs are not much more informative than the Summary line.
Finally, as you can see in this analysis, the StackyHack system does not include all possible forms of data collection. For example, there is no review data information.
The Daily Project Details analysis provides a comprehensive snapshot of a software development project on a given day. For both developers and managers, it provides new visibility into the state of the project on a single day. It is obvious, yet important to note that the availability and utility of the Daily Project Details analysis depends critically on the tools and sensors being run each day! If you do not run the PMD tool each day, then you will not know how many PMD-related code issues exist in the code at any particular point in time. We have found that the best way to obtain regular Daily Project Details data is to attach the analyses to an automated daily build mechanism. If you are not doing automated daily builds currently, then this might provide additional motivation. Once you start to do automated daily builds, you'll wonder how you ever did software development without them!