User:Mallen

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

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.