Re: Custom reporting / dashboard extension ?

The short answer is 'yes', eventually. :) The long answer is a bit
more complicated...

In the last few days I've been thinking more about reporting. It would
be really nice to have reports for all kinds of things:
- How many builds did we do in total in our organisation last week?
- What percentage of the time are each of our build servers building?
- Who is the person that breaks the build least often?
- Can I see the FxCop covererage in a chart for all of my projects?

I've been thinking more about a 'domain model' for CCNet, and here we
see more parts of such a domain model, like:
- project
- build server
- build
- person (committer)
- metric

I think we should be able to report against any part of this domain
model. I think the Web Dashboard would be a great user interface for
it.

That's combined with last week when I was at a Microsoft session and
started to get sold on Service Oriented Architectures. I'd like to
introduce at some point the concept of a 'Reporting Service'. It would
be responsible for giving out any information, in various formats, of
any historical CCNet event. (NB - A 'Status Service' might give out
details of what's happening 'right now').

As such the Reporting Service would 'own' all the build logs, and
would have the ability to produce styled reports. It would also answer
as to what reports were available for any particular instance of the
above listed types. I'm thinking that we may use a relational
persistence scheme, allowing users to optionally use a Database for
persistence and so use their own reporting technologies as well (this
has already been requested!)

Separating user interface from report implementation would make adding
new reports *much* easier since no UI updates would be required.

NB - just because a Reporting Service is a separate logical component,
it would be optional whether to deploy it separately. Out of the box
CCNet would be as simple to use as always, and in this simple case the
Reporting Service would (probably) run in the same process as the
CCNet Server.

OK, all well and good, but when is this going to happen? Probably not
soon. The emphasis right now continues to be on:
- Replacing the old web app with the web dashboard
- Allowing users to configure CCNet solely through the Dashboard
- MSI install using Wix (If anyone wants to volunteer for this, it
would be a GREAT HELP! :) )

But the reporting stuff would be a lot of fun. :)

Hope that's useful,

Mike

On Wed, 24 Nov 2004 17:34:38 +0100, Thibaut Barrère
<thibaut.barrere-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> As I'm starting to add NCover to the build process, I thought it would
> be nice to  have a place where I can see the test coverage state for
> all the projects at once (just a percentage figure like "95%"), so I
> can quickly decide if I should spend some time adding tests on the
> loosers of my hall of ncover-fame.
> 
> Not sure where it leads yet, but should the dashboard be extended (or
> extensible) in some way to provide more reporting ? Or should there be
> another mechanism to build statistic informations ?
> 
> just a thought
> 
> Thibaut
> 


-- 
mike roberts | http://mikeroberts.thoughtworks.net/ |
http://www.thoughtworks.com/


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