Plan to engage in an industrial case study with them

12/01 : Received a confirmed email saying that the company is interested in engaging a case study with Zorro. However, they use Microsoft Visual Studio .NET platform, which is not well supported by Hackystat. In order to get started, we need to quickly enhance the Visual Studio Sensor. At the moment, as to our information, they will use tools including NUnit, FxCop, and StartTeam. None of them have Hackystat sensors.

12/01 : Discussed with Cedric on the possibilities making the Visual Studio Sensor ready for collecting the required DevEvents of TDD.

12/03 : Both Cedirc and I investigated how to improve the Hackystat Visual Studio sensor. One roadblock is that .NET gives access to the CodeDom, a abstract syntax tree of C# code. But it is not possible to know how many statements written.

12/03 : Microsoft Visual Studio has multiple versions!

12/05 : They are using Visual Studio 2005 team ed. for developers.

12/06 : We don't have the Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition. It is proprietary. It has its own testing framework that is unknown to us. Philip emailed his friend in Microsoft to inquire the possibility to get software and the tech support.

Initial comment

I've looked at the Zorro demo ? interesting! Currently we?re planning a case-study of TDD (VS an existing TL-practice). We have tried to get assistance from the case company in ?harvesting? some of the data you focus on to be able to compare variables such as time spent for testing/coding, testcode size/prod. code size etc. We?re also interested in finding ways of validating any effect that the TDD-practice may have on product quality and speed of production and also potentially on code quality (maintainability, code design-style and others). (As usual), it turns out to be hard to do so in practice ? these guys are putting maximum pressure on reaching the next deadline ? avoiding anything that does not add direct value to the project.

Thus, I find the idea of automating some data collection tempting. However, in this case they use VS.Net, not Eclipse. Do you see any possibility to (easily) port Zorro to work with Visual Studio? My guess is that it would take a lot of rework.. However, it would open up a lot of new cases for you. Any plans?

Good luck with you work.