User:Stefan.christov

Revision as of 01:03, 25 August 2015

Stefan Christov

Stefan Christov is an Associate Professor of Software Engineering at Quinnipiac University. He currently teaches courses on software quality assurance, software engineering in health care, software project management, and a software engineering module in an introductory engineering course.

Stefan Christov's current research interests include improving the quality of human-intensive processes (HIPs), such as medical processes, with a focus on detecting human errors before harm is done and preventing such errors. He has used software engineering techniques to formally express and analyze models of complex HIPs and industrial engineering techniques to elicit and validate models of such processes. He is also interested in human-computer interaction techniques for presenting information to assist process performers during an ongoing process.

Stefan enjoys outdoor activities, such as running, hiking, and skiing. Other hobbies include traveling and salsa dancing.

Part A Activities

Answers to "Intro to IRC Activity" questions:

• How do people interact? By entering comments in the IRC channel, using a combination of free text and IRC commands.
• What is the pattern of communication? A meeting chair initiates the meeting and sets a topic. Other meeting participants discuss the topic (e.g., issues they have encountered, proposed solutions).
• Are there any terms that seem to have special meaning? 'IRC meeting chair', 'MeetBot', the IRC commands.
• Can you make any other observations? Occasionally, the meeting chair issues IRC commands to summarize discussion points and log action items.
• Join an HFOSS project's channel, observe for 24 hours, summarize observations. I joined the #foss2serve channel. For the period that I observed, someone changed their nick and there was an announcement about a conference.

Answers to "Project Anatomy Activity" questions:

• The Sugar Labs Project
  • Summarize the information under 'Contacts' for several teams of Sugar Labs. It is typical for a team to provide information about team coordinator(s), team members, and an IRC channel. Some teams also provide a mailing list.
  • Indicate the types/categories of tickets listed on this page as well as the information available for each ticket. Types: defect, enhancement, and task. Info for each ticket: ticket number, summary, status, owner, type, priority, milestone.
  • Does the project use a web-based common repository or a local repo? It uses a web-based repo.
  • Describe how the release cycle and roadmap update are related. A roadmap update is performed at the beginning of each release cycle.
• The Sahana Eden Project
  • Summarize the information found under each group. Most groups contain information about the activities of the group, guidelines for performing these activities, and information about tools to support these activities. The structure of the page for each team in the Sugar Labs project seems a bit more rigorous than the structure of the teams' pages in the Sahana Eden Project--for example, for the Sugar Labs project, each team's page starts with a mission, the contacts page has a standard set of sections, etc.
  • Tracker
    • How is the information here different than the information found on the Sugar Labs tracker page? The info here is organized by queries related to the existing tickets, such as tickets that are currently active and recently fixed bugs.
    • 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: defect/bug, enhancement, task, documentation. Info for each ticket: Ticket number, Summary, Component, Version, Priority, Type, Owner, Status, Date Ticket Created.
  • Does the project use a web-based common repository or a local repo? The code resides on GitHub, so there is a web-based common repository. Users/developers can clone the code into a local git repository on their machine.
  • Describe the information found on the project's roadmap. The roadmap contains different releases and the key features each release must contain, along with other information, such as how much of each release is completed and when the release is due.

Part B Activities

FOSS Field Trip Activity

Part 1 - SourceForge

Do the following:

1. Go to: http://sourceforge.net/
2. Use the Search feature in the center of the screen to view applications in an area of interest to you (e.g., gaming, sports, music, computing, etc.). Healthcare.
3. How many projects are there in this category? 2490
4. How many different programming languages are used to write software in this category? 15
5. List the top four programming languages used to write programs in this category. Java, PHP, C++, JavaScript
6. Identify the meaning of each of the statuses below:
   1. Inactive The project is not currently being worked on.
   2. Mature The project has been thoroughly tested, has been released and used? has a steady development community?
   3. Production/Stable The project is not rapidly changing, there are no major bugs, a working version has been released.
   4. Beta The project is in beta testing.
   5. Alpha The project is in alpha testing.
   6. Pre-Alpha The implementation on the project has started (i.e., it is part the planning stage), but alpha testing has not been performed yet.
   7. Planning The project is still being planned, major implementation hasn't started yet.
7. Compare two projects in this category that have two different statuses. Describe the differences between the statuses. OpenMRS, status Production/Stable; Digit Span Tester, status Inactive. I noticed that some projects are in at least two different statuses. E.g., OpenMRS seems to be both in Production/Stable and Beta statuses.
8. Which projects are the most used? How do you know? Hospital Management System, Liferay Portal, Pentaho, based on Sourceforge's sorting of projects by "Most Popular". Another indicator could be the number of downloads.
9. Pick a project in your category. Answer the questions below: YAWL
   1. What does it do? Provides support for modeling and managing workflows.
   2. What programming language is the project written in? Java.
   3. Who is likely to use the project? How do you know this? People interested in modeling workflows. Two major audiences are people who deal with business processes and people who deal with healthcare processes. This assumption is based on some prior knowledge about YAWL and the description of the project on Sourceforge.
   4. When was the most recent change made to the project? 2015-06-18
   5. How active is the project? How can you tell? The project seems pretty active based on the recency and the frequency of commits.
   6. How many committers does the project have? 3
   7. Would you use the project? Why or why not? Probably yes. It has high ratings, good reviews, and it seems that it is actively maintained.

Part 2 - OpenHub

In this activity, you will use OpenHub to gather information about a Humanitarian Free and Open Source project named OpenMRS.

Explore OpenMRS:

1. Go to: https://www.openhub.net/
2. In the upper-most search space, enter: OpenMRS
3. Click on the OpenMRS logo or link.
4. What is the main programming language used in OpenMRS? Java.
5. How many lines of code does OpenMRS have? 3,871,399
6. Click on "User & Contributor Locations" (lower right side of screen). List some of the locations of the developers. Boston, MA; Indianapolis, IN; Cape Town, Republic of South Africa.
7. Go back to the main OpenMRS page. Click on the "Languages" link. How many languages is OpenMRS written in? 15
8. What language has the second highest number of lines of code? JavaScript
9. Of the programming languages used in OpenMRS , which language the has the highest comment ratio? Java
10. Click on the “Contributors” link under "SCM Data" menu.
11. What is the average number of contributors in the last 12 months? 7
12. Scroll down to the Top Contributors section. How long have the top three contributors been involved in the project? 4 years
13. Use the information on the project summary page to compute the 12-month average of commits. What is the average number of commits over the past 12 months?. 64

Project Evaluation Activity

Material related to this activity is posted on my blog.