Cam and I were just talking on the phone, and we came up with the following:
A telemetry usability problem for a just installed configuration of Hackystat is figuring out how to "bootstrap" the set of Telemetry definitions. Charts must be composed from Streams, and Streams must be composed from Reduction Functions, and the set of available Reduction Functions are not known in advance for any given configuration. Currently, the system comes up with no definitions for Y-Axis, Streams, Charts, or Reports, which means the new user has to somehow figure out all of these initial definitions by themselves.
One way to help with the bootstrapping is to provide in the XML definition of a reduction function a set of "sample" Streams (and perhaps Charts as well). The Reduction Function designer could decide what constitute reasonable "shrinkwrapped" versions. These definitions would be implicitly defined in the administrator account and provided with "global" access when the system is installed. Thus, the system would come up with a set of usable stream (and chart) definitions that people could use immediately.
Comments? Anyone feel like implementing this? I've put it into Jira as: <http://hackydev.ics.hawaii.edu:8080/browse/HACK-867> Cheers, Philip
