User:Jfrench

Jean (Jeannie) H. French

Jean H. French, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computing Sciences at Coastal Carolina University (CCU). CCU is a public, liberal arts institution minutes from Myrtle Beach, SC. CCU offers undergraduate, graduate, and Ph.D. programs to nearly 10,000 students. The Department of Computing Sciences offers Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science, Information Systems, and Information Technology.

Dr. French's main areas of teaching are in Web programming, multimedia, and data sciences. Classroom projects often involve real-world problems for students to solve for the university or industry. Dr. French is highly involved in academic assessment as chair of departmental assessment and ABET accreditation, and also as chair of assessment for all university academic programs. Dr. French also serves as the vice chair of Faculty Senate.

When not teaching and assessing, she is busy raising her two little girls (4 and 6) with her husband. Though she enjoys living in Myrtle Beach, she is one of six children from Boston, Mass. and enjoys heading home to visit family.

DELIVERABLE: Stage 1 - Part A - Intro IRC Activity

Part 1 How do people interact? The interaction was polite and informal conversation with questions, answers, comments, 'at-a-boy confirmations, and some emoticons.

What is the pattern of communication? Is it linear or branched? Formal or informal? One-to-many, one-to-one or a mix? The pattern of communication is informal and branched with mostly one-to-many. For example, informal speech was mentioned in the previous question. The conversation was branched because in the middle of a related thread of comments, there were side comments like "Sorry, Firefox creashed" by Heidi. The conversation was mostly one-to-many because one might have a question, but the others chimed in with suggestions.

Are there any terms that seem to have special meaning? info, action, topic all seem to have special meanings and these terms were evaluated in a special way in the final PDF meeting notes.

What advantages might IRC have over other real-time communication methods (like Google Chat or Facebook Messenger?) Are there potential disadvantages? While I used the Firefox browser plug-in, it was not necessary. There were a number of ways to connect to the conversation. The disadvantage is that this is only text-based. Except for texting content, there was no additional way to convey information such as images, video, or sound.

Can you make any other observations? I noticed that it looked like if a user wanted to get the attention of a particular user, they would type the name of that user.

Bonus question: Why didn't Heidi and Darci's actions get picked up by the meetbot? I really don't see this. There were three #action notes in the conversation by users darci and heidi. All three were included in the meeting summary PDF 18:12:58 <darci> #action amber will try graphviz This was indicated in the summary at 1.c. 18:51:28 <heidi> #action Heidi look into the status of releases in the next week. This was indicated in the summary at 1.h. 19:06:06 <darci> #action Darci will find John some easy Python projects to work on. This was indicated in the summary at 2.a.

For Part 2: N/A

For Part 3: I connected to the Mousetrap IRC. There were no active conversations when I was logged in, but I reviewed a number of the logs. There do not appear to be many users in any of the logs and the most active user is stoney. During one meeting, users kevin-brown and heidie had little to report, but also not much feedback to user stoney. User stoney had over 20 entries (from 17:06:33 to 17:13:28) with no response from either of the other users and user stoney pointed out the "silence." During one of the logs, it appeared to be a meeting with only stoney and the log seemed not to be used for conversation, but as a record of individual activity. The act of ending the meetings seems to just be an end meeting command with no confirmation that the meeting is about to end. It appears if some minutes have gone by without activity that the meeting is simply ended without comments about the next meeting. I suspect there must be other ways the users are communicating???

Part 4 (optional): N/A

DELIVERABLE: Stage 1 - Part A - Project Anatomy Activity

SUGAR LABS PROJECT

Summary of Contact Pages: None of the teams had contacts cross-listed (each team had unique members). All three teams used and IRC Channel. In addition, the Documentation Team and the Activity Team had a mailing list. Development & Documentation both are without coordinators.

Activity Team: The activity team is responsible for keeping track of all of the activities available. This includes finding and working with developers and other teams. They can't just have random activities from different people. Though they encourage developers, they provide resources and oversight for the organized development of Sugar.

Development Team: The development team is responsible for actually building the Sugar environment. This includes working to fix any problems in addition to adding new features that need to be added to Sugar.

Documentation Team: The Documentation Team is responsible for creating and updating the user manuals. They need to have different versions of the manuals in different languages. For example, they are working on a Spanish version for the Sugar FLOSS manual.

Tracker: There are three types of categories listed: defect, enhancement, and task. The "task" category is only listed once. A majority of the tickets are for defects. Ticket information includes what appears to be a unique number, a summary, status of the ticket (new, assigned, reopened, and accepted). The ticket also includes an owner username, the type (as previously described), a priority and whether the ticket has to do with a particular milestone (if not, it it left as unspecified).

Repository: It is local. After viewing the Webpage source code, it provided URLs such as git://git.sugarlabs.org/sugar-base/mainline.git. When I simplified and went to git.sugarlabs.org, it shows that they are using Gitorious that states "Gitorious is a great way of collaborating on distributed open source projects." When I went to http://www.gitorious.com/, you can see that there are managed server and local install installation options. Since the source code shows git.sugarlabs.org, it looks like they opted with installing it on their own servers under the sugarlabs.org domain.

Release Cycle: The roadmap is updates at the beginning of each release cycle. The release team is responsible for the release cycle that determines the updating of Development Team's Roadmap.

THE SAHANA EDEN PROJECT

Summary of groups: When comparing the teams, it wasn't directly clear who was helping to keep the various development pieces organized. There is a Coding Tasks list that is open for individuals to pick and choose what they want to work on. The information is not as consistent on this website. For example, the Designers page makes no mention of the communication methods used, where the developers had IRC and mailing list information readily available.

Tracker: The tracker page first shows categories and then you need to click on the categories to find the list of individual tickets. For example, there was a category titled "My Tickets" which would (I assume) list only the tickets related to me (had I had any tickets in the system).

Active Tickets: The Active Tickets page shows the list of active tickets by a unique number. There is a summary. In addition, there is the component related to the ticket (Web, CSS, GIS, etc), a version (most are categorized as trunk tickets), the priority, the owner, the status, and the date the ticket was created. Some rows of tickets are highlighted in blue.

Repository: It is local. The installation directions specifically states navigating to the localhost after installation.

Release Cycle: There appear to be three named projects and release numbers. Two don't have dates and one says it is four years late. There is a tracking graphic that shows what percentage the release is in terms of being completed (it also shows the tickets associated for further information on the percentage complete. The page also shows a list of different modules/activities that are included in each.

END of STAGE 1 - Part A: Due August 6th

Part B-1 - SourceForge Sourceforge

Topic: Video Editing

Categories: 2079

Languages: C++(79); Java(342); C(239); C#(202); Python(99); JavaScript(90); PHP(87); Visual Basic .NET(69); Delphi/Kylix(57); Assembly(29); Perl(25); Unix Shell(23); Lazarus(22); Matlab(20); Visual Basic(20)

Top 4 Programming Languages: C++, Java, C, C#

Meanings of Statues: According Koper-Capodistria (2013), The SourceForge statuses indicate levels of progress of software development using a numbering system from 1 - 7. In order of progress, the statuses are planning, alpha, beta, and stable. The statuses are upgraded with "improvements in completeness, consistency, testability, usability, and reliablitiy". Inactive projects are those not included in the other status designations as there is either no code available or a lack of developers to work on the code. Koper-Capodistria further states that SourceForge leaves it up to developers to determine whether the project is pre-Alpha vs Alpha or Production/Stable vs Mature as there are "only vague definitions" of the categories. Koper-Capodistria, S. (2013). Open source software: Quality verification. Proceedings of the 9th IFIP WG 2.13 International Conference (OSS 2013). Available from books.google.com.

Comparison of categories. I compared "Planning" and "Mature" statuses. It was surprising that a number of projects in the "planning" stage had not been updated in years. There was one project that was registered in 2006, but was last updated in 2012. I don't quite know why it was abandoned and moved to Inactive. This makes me wonder what really qualifies for inactive. For the ones I checked in the planning stage, there were no downloads in the downloads "This Week" section. There were some with a "browse code" option, though. For the mature projects, the ones I checked had more recent (as in even recent weeks) updates. There were useful user reviews (up to 5-stars) and a download option. The descriptions were also more developed.

Projects Most Used: First, I'll note that even though I entered "video editing" in the search, the results were not limited to projects that actually edited video. Some were video players, others sound editors. I chose the sort by "most popular" to determine which were the most used. Some of these products had tens of thousands of downloads in a week (one had over 100,000 downloads).

Project in my category: I chose the "DVDStyler" project in the video editing category. The link is http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvdstyler/

What does it do? The DVDStyler is a DVD authoring program that "makes possible for video enthusiasts to create professional-looking DVDs." It includes DVD menus, templates, and options to select format, and basic editing features.

Programming language: C++

Users are those who want to create DVDs. The description says this and so do the user reviewer comments.

Most recent change: The most recent change was 6 days ago, so the developers are active. More specifically, the developers closed a bunch of tickets on August 5th that addressed some older problems that were fixed, so the dates are not quite accurate. The wiki doesn't have much information. There is a link to the project's external site, but it is marked as having malicious software by my security. There are also reviews that say the software itself has malware, so I'm not going to dig any deeper. If I were looking for this type of software I wouldn't download it.

Committers: I cannot find anyone other than user ntalex (Alex Theuring) on any of the documentation.

Would use? As mentioned before, this software looks dangerous, thus I wouldn't use it. If I can't even safely go to the website to read more, I'm definitely going to avoid it. I'm a regular user of SorceForge and I've never come across software that was so sketchy. I was surprised. One reviewer stated "@sourceforge - Really? You're going to allow this?" and I agree with that surprise and frustration.