Portland State's wacky quarters system means that, unlike everyone on a trimester system, I don't finish school until next week. I've been busy wrapping up classes and, considering that I haven't been able to devote my full attention to the project, I've made some good progress.
I setup a local test site using my Drupal.org testing profile. The profile generates some basic test data which should be sufficient for my initial work but down the road I'll need a copy of the sanitized drupal.org database dww mentioned.
The next step in my proposal is to identify a few simple metrics to serve as test cases when developing the framework. The data used to build the issue statistics pages seems like it would be a good choice but until I've dug into the guts of the project module to see how they're generated I can't say for sure.