User:Scrain

Revision as of 20:27, 23 October 2014

Dr. Steven P. Crain

I am an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the lovely SUNY Plattsburgh [1] nestled in the Champlain Valley at the base of the Adirondack Mountains. When I am not working with students, I am often seen hiking in the mountains or sliding silently along a ski trail. (OK, so really I am seen in a jumbled up mess at the bottom of a small hill....) I am an aspiring 46er [2] and have hiked 12 of the 46 high peaks in the Adirondacks so far, though I am aiming to add 4 more this week.

My research area is machine learning, with a special interest in humanitarian applications. I often work with the Diabetes Hands Foundation [3] on search and recommendation projects. As a rule, I would rather focus on involving undergraduate students in my work than on churning out publications.

Notes on Participation in HFOSS

IRC

How do people interact?

The interactions are informal, productive and collegial.

What is the pattern of communication?

The meeting focuses on one person at a time, but everyone chimes in with whatever will be helpful, either for solving a problem the focal person is facing or to build community. Normally the post is understood to be directed to the focal person, but a specific person can be addresses if they raise a point that warrants discussion.

Are there any terms that seem to have special meaning?

There are many common software development terms (e.g. VM, UML). Beyond that, "lab" may have special meaning.

Can you make any other observations?

This is definitely a productive working meeting. They tackle one issue at a time, and try to either work through whatever is blocking as a group or at least point the person in a productive direction. When issues are more work than they are worth, they table the issue and find more productive things to work on.

Summarize your observations of #mifos

I found the IRC channel easily using a web search for "mifos freenode." There are 1 or 2 people hanging out on the channel, but no discussion going on at present. The channel topic indicates that the channel is logged, but the link to the log goes to a non-responsive server. The Internet Archive [4] has record of an IRC session log from 2010, but the log itself did not get archived.

Summarize your observations of #openmrs

Given that #mifos was a flop, I also looked at #openmrs. This channel has a bunch of automatic updates whenever anyone starts working on a task or commits a change. Also, the result of automatic builds gets logged to the channel. People generally start conversations by saying "hi" to the person they need to talk to. In one conversation, someone was concerned that a design decision another made might not be wise long-term. He asked if the decision might be bad in the future. A collegial conversation proceeded in which they worked out the best plan and figured out who would implement it. Other conversations revolved around figuring our how to migrate features from one release to another and making arrangements to work together on particular tasks at a convenient mutually agreeable time.

Project Anatomy

What is unique about each Sugar Labs team?

Activity Team

The activities team is trying to foster development of shared activities. They have two coordinators and a large number of contributors listed on their contacts.

Development Team

The development team is responsible for the code and releases. They currently have a core of key people, but are looking for someone who can help coordinate them.

Documentation Team

The documentation team is producing documentation, including technical docs, videos and tutorials. Their contacts list two editors, one providing mentoring to new people and one helping to coordinate efforts.

Tracker

The tracker tracks enhancements, defects and tasks. For each issue, the tracker provides metadata (status, who opened it, when, who is watching it, which part of the project is effected, etc) a description of the issue, history of discussion about the issue and attachments that help explain it better.

Repository

Sugar labs uses the common repository hosted by Git at [5].

Release Cycles

Sugar labs is a large project with a lot going on. They organize the work on the many aspects around an explicit release cycle for the whole project. At the begining of each cycle, each team updates its roadmap to document what work they will do and what the relevant local mile stones and deadlines need to be to make the release cycle deadlines.

Sahana Eden

Community

This project is more organized in its approach in comparison with Sugar Labs. For example, developers are required to take some training and sign agreements before commencing. The public persona is also less personal, focusing more on the team identities than the individuals who lead them.

Developers

There are a lot of hoops to being a developer, including taking technical training and signing license agreements.

Testers

Less organized, you just have a manual to read through and follow the testing procedure. If you find any bugs, you submit them like ordinary bugs from anybody using the project. Not clear how to get good test coverage without knowing who is testing and what they are testing.

Designers

Potential designers are given guidelines on the ideal image of the sites, and can submit suggestions on how to improve the site to be more usable and attractive.

Tracker

How is the information here different than the information found on the Sugar Labs tracker page?

Instead of a form for customizing the list of issues to display, there are a set of prefabricated flavors of the report. The issues have less detail about how they relate to the project structure and do not have support for attachments. Each issue is assigned to a person who is responsible for the fix.

Click the Active Tickets link. Indicate the types/categories of tickets listed on this page as well as the information available for each ticket.

Types include defect/bug, documentation, enhancement, task. Each issue has a number, owner, description, status, time created, history, associated component, version, severity.

Repository

This is also hosted on Git, at [6].

Release Cycle

The release cycle is planned around completing certain selected functionality instead of planning for releases at certain times. The next release was planned to be done 3 years ago, but there is still work to go. The next cycle is planned out as well, and the following cycle is just sketched out.