Becoming an effective Hackystat developer requires gaining some experience as a user and as an administrator first. Before jumping into coding, we recommend you consider the following preliminary tasks.
To be an effective and efficient Hackystat developer, you first have to understand the system from the perspective of a user. Start by reading through the User Guide, but don't stop there. Actually register with the public Hackystat server, download hackyInstaller, and install some sensors. Start sending data to the public server, and then login and perform some analyses.
It is also extremely useful to step through each section in Chapter 4, Collecting and analyzing process and product measures for Java systems using Ant and see for yourself how product data can be collected and analyzed in Hackystat.
Finally, perform some telemetry or other analyses on your data to get a sense for the kinds of advanced features of the system from a user perspective.
It may take you a few days to a week to work through the user-related material, but the experience is worth the investment of time. You will understand much more about the strengths and weaknesses of the system, and have a more concrete understanding of how you can contribute to make it better.
Once you are comfortable with Hackystat from a user's point of view, the next stage in your journey is to understand how to download, build, and install a Hackystat system from sources. This is documented in the Administrator Guide.
The goal here is for you to become comfortable with obtaining the latest Hackystat sources from our Subversion repository, creating a configuration of Hackystat, and building your configuration and installing it on your local system as a web application. While the Hackystat user provides a "client-side" view of the system, the Hackystat administrator provides a complementary "server-side" view.
Once you have become familiar with the system both as a user and as an administrator, you are now ready to become a developer.
Familiarity with the system as a user and as a developer provides you with the background and perspective needed for being an effective and efficient developer. You are taking the right step as a developer by reading this Developer Guide. You should also subscribe to the various mailing lists. And, finally, don't hesitate to email current Hackystat developers with your comments or questions.