Innovation Accounting for your .NET Apps

FeatureWise can deliver the data to help answer the following questions:

• What features are your users using the most?
• Are there any features that your users do not use at all?
• In which features do users spend most of their time?
• Are there usage patterns that will help us allocate resources?
• What is the most important thing that we should work on next?

Whether you're managing a large enterprise application or just have the seeds of a startup lean thinking is driving more and more decisions. Plain and simple the projects who act on the best data will emerge as champions of markets.

The good news is that data is fairly trivial to collect.

The bad news is that it is difficult to find the time to write the data collection code and the dashboard with all your regular demands.

The worst news is that vendors on the market can be prohibitively expensive for startups or projects with constrained budgets.

FeatureWise was built to target some specific needs for software innovation accounting. Currently FeatureWise provides some of the more fundamental metrics such as usage counts and durations. It is not a robust tool like you'd find with a big vendor but hey - it's free!

The FeatureWise server is an ASP.NET MVC4 application (with a dash of WebAPI). So you can host it right in IIS, or on Azure. To get started you're going to need Visual Studio with .NET 4.5 and SQLServer.

There is also a .NET client library based on the 4.5 Framework which you can reference from your application. The client is available as a NuGet package or by referencing the output assembly of the FWClient project: FeatureWise.dll. The client provides a simple API for you to send usage events off to the server. Configuration of the client is fairly simple, just define the hostname of your server in the FeatureWise.Hostname configuration property of your App.Config. There is a singleton called FeatureWise that you will use to track usage events in your application. For example:

FeatureWise.Tick("feature1")

FeatureWise.Start("feature2")

FeatureWise.Stop("feature2")

Or if you want control over the timestamps:

FeatureWise.Tick("feature1", DateTime.UtcNow)

FeatureWise.Start("feature2", DateTime.UtcNow)

FeatureWise.Stop("feature2", DateTime.UtcNow)

The simplest way to track usage is with Ticks. Any time a user triggers a particular feature you can send a Tick event off. Ticks are useful to collect frequency counts and will show up in all of the usage charts.

The other way to track usage is through Elapsed Time. To use elapsed time you can send a Start event when the user triggers a feature and a Stop when the feature is done. This can help you identify tasks that might be taking longer than others and help to understand how long users spend in particular forms and performing specific tasks.

To generate a report simply visit the service web page and click the "Generate" button on the report page. Currently reports are generated within the web request. I suspect we will quickly outgrow this and have to move to some kind of ETL process.

• Create SQLServer database called 'FeatureWiseDev'
• Fetch NuGet packages
• Create database using EntityFramework's migration tool
• Hack. Send a pull request. Tests are highly encouraged.

• I'm not a UI/UX guy and could really use some help in making this thing sexy. Please lend a helping hand if you have such skills.
• .NET is painful. Any sweetness to the build process would be appreciated. For example, punching out properties from web.config so we don't have to hardcode db names. Or MsBuild targets to run all tests.
• Advice on additional data to collect, reports, etc.