Deploying, updating, and managing tools for collecting software metrics

Abstract

Collecting software engineering data is difficult due to the number of problems that researchers face in this activity. One of the most relevant is the ability to install and keep up-to-date the measurement tools installed in the production machines in order to collect such data. Even when a few machines are involved, maintaining all the tools required to collect data from the different development tools requires a full-time system administrator. Moreover, since most of these tools are research tools, researchers are updating them very frequently to fix bugs or to add new features. In a production environment, especially when Agile Methodologies are in place, the time and effort. For these reasons, automating the management of the tools for metrics collection is a key factor to provide easy-to-use tools and allow development teams to collect data useful for both practitioners and researchers.