User:Mallen

Revision as of 05:10, 2 November 2014

Meghan Allen

Meghan Allen is an Instructor in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and Vantage College at UBC. The department of Computer Science has 55 faculty members, approximately 1300 undergraduate computer science majors and 200 graduate students. Vantage College has welcomed its first class of 187 students in August, 2014.

Meghan has been teaching in Computer Science at UBC since 2007 and has focused on teaching CS1, CS2 and an Introduction to Software Engineering course. She is currently focusing on creating curriculum and teaching for Vantage College, which offers an innovative, first-year program for international students.

Intro to IRC

How do people interact? The interactions seem fairly casual, but it seems like there is a chair of the meeting that keeps the conversation on track. The chair uses some meetbot commands to take minutes. The team members give updates and help each othr when they can.

What is the pattern of communication? It seems like one person at a time talks about what they've been working on and others jump in if they have questions or something to add.

Are there any terms that seem to have special meaning? The meetbot commands, and it seems that you can mention a member of the conversation (e.g. to ask them a question)

Anatomy of a FOSS Project

Sugar Project Activity team: develops and maintains activities for Sugar as well as interacting with community contributors. Works with Development and Infrastructure teams to ensure developers have what they need. Documents activities Development team: designs and implements core Sugar environment. Works closely with the Design and Testing teams Documentation team: creates documentation for users and developers

Some commonality between the teams is that the Activity and Documentation teams both work on documentation although at a different scale. Also, the Development and Activity teams both do development, but they develop different things.

Issues: types/categories: defects or enhancements For each ticket, the following information is included - reporter, priority, relevant component, severity, list of other interested team members, status, owner, milestone fix is planned for, keywords, distribution or OS that the issue occurs in and a description. Each ticket also includes attachments, a reference to related change sets, comments and a history of changes

I think Sugar uses a web-based common Git repo

The Development Team's Roadmap is updated at the beginning of each release cycle by the release team.

Sahana Eden Project Developers: Once developers get set up, they can choose what size and kind of project to work on Testers: The project lists many ways for people to get involved with Testing. Testers can choose to manually test, write test cases or work on the CI server. Designers: Designers are graphic designers who wish to contribute to the project. The project prefers HTML/CSS contributions but accepts others.

This is different than what I found for the Sugar project because the developers are not broken into teams. There are also tasks listed for potential contributors with a range of skills (manual tests, graphic designers, CI server specialists, etc.) so it seems like it would be easier for someone to figure out how they could contribute to Sahana than it would be to figure out how to contribute to Sugar.

The Sahana tickets are grouped into specific queries - to see all the open tickets I have to click on Active tickets. types of tickets: defect/bug, documentation, task, enhancement each ticket includes reporter, priority, relevant component, keywords, due date, description, owner, milestone and version, list of other interested community members, comments, change history

I think Sahana uses a local repo

Sahana's roadmap page includes current and past milestones, including the details of what has changed for each milestone

FOSS Field Trip Activity

Source Forge

I searched for Kids Games and there were 30250 projects that use 15 different programming languages. The top four programming languages are C++, Java, C, and C#.

   Inactive - not currently being worked on
   Mature - not sure - complete project with good documentation?
   Production/Stable - production release available for download
   Beta - beta release available for download
   Alpha - alpha release available for download
   Pre-Alpha - version of project is so young that it's not even ready for an alpha release yet
   Planning - still in planning stages, not yet anything ready to download and use

Compare two projects in this category that have two different statuses. Describe the differences between the statuses.

Computational Intelligence in Games is Mature. It has 24 downloads this week and was last updated in July, 2013. Games Museum is Inactive. It has no downloads this week but was also last updated in July, 2013.

Which projects are the most used? How do you know? I think the Most Popular projects are the most used as they have the highest number of downloads.

Pick a project in your category.

I picked Tux Paint

   What does it do?
      It's a drawing program for kids aged 3-12.
   What programming language is the project written in?
      It's written in C.
   Who is likely to use the project? How do you know this?
      From the description, I think parents of young kids or older kids would download and set it up.
   When was the most recent change made to the project?
      The most recent work was to package up a new release (for different OS's)
   How active is the project? How can you tell?
      It's pretty active. The mailing list archive shows discussions as recent as August.
   How many committers does the project have?
      64
   Would you use the project? Why or why not? 
      Maybe! I have three-year-old boys that might enjoy it.

MIFOS

Is mostly written in Java and has 2, 673, 467 lines of code.

List some of the locations of the developers. (The map won't show up for me in Firefox or IE for longer than about .5 seconds. I can tell that there are contributors all over the world but can't see exactly where)

Mifos is written in 19 languages and the second most used language is XML. Perl has the highest comment ratio.

The average number of contributors in the last 12 months is about 1.

The top three contributors have been involved in the project for 1 year, 3 years and 4 years, respectively.

The average number of commits per month is 5.5 over the last year.

FOSS in my courses

I have a number of ideas about how I might use FOSS in my courses.

CS2 Our CS2 starts with students reading code and using models to help understand the code. They extract control-flow diagrams, call graphs and UML class diagrams from existing code. We have searched for FOSS projects for the students to work with and often can't find appropriate projects. I'm interested in finding projects written in Java that are fairly small to use in the beginning of CS2.

Our students do about 5 assignments and a longer (5-6 week) project in CS2. I like some of the ideas at the bottom of http://www.xcitegroup.org/softhum/doku.php?id=f:50ways for our assignments. Specifically, I think our students would learn a lot from these assignments

   - Find/study examples of well & poorly written code
   - Look at coding standard for an open source project (Java, Python)
   - Reformat code, rename variables, etc. (possibly commit back depending on project)
   - Test (perhaps a project that does JUnit testing).
   - Trace the execution of some piece of code.
   - Develop UML diagram from an existing project. 
   - Identify data structures used in a project.

CS2 is team taught at my university so I can't make decisions about its curriculum without consulting my colleagues. One of my colleagues will likely be spending a significant amount of time revising the CS2 curriculum between Sept 2015 - Aug 2016. After I attend the workshop in November I intend to talk to him and my other colleagues to see if we can integrate HFOSS into the curriculum.

Third-year project course We have a third-year project course that is always looking for clients who have projects the students can work on. There may be an opportunity to integrate an HFOSS project into this course if there was someone from the project who was willing to act as the contact or if I was able to learn enough about a specific project to act as a client.

Directed studies course Our university offers directed studies courses, in which a student (or students) and a faculty member submit a proposal to work on a project together for one or two semesters. The students get course credit for their work. I think this may be the easiest way to get a few students involved in HFOSS work.