User:SSultana

Revision as of 00:24, 24 October 2016

Simon Sultana

Simon Sultana is a faculty member and director for programs in Software Engineering and Computer Information Systems at Fresno Pacific University [1], in Fresno, California. The institution is a private, nonprofit university, which has five locations including the main campus, North Fresno, Merced, Visalia, and Bakersfield, offers traditional undergraduate and degree completion programs.

Dr. Sultana began designing a traditional undergraduate program in Software Engineering and a degree completion program in Computer Information Systems in 2015 and both programs were scheduled to launch by 2017.

Dr. Sultana has worked in higher education for over ten years, previously at a private for-profit institution serving as program dean in the areas of electronics and computer technology, networking, and computer information systems. Previously, he worked for over ten years in the automotive industry as an electrical engineer for Chrysler Corporation, Motorola, and an engineering consulting firm.

Responses to Intro IRC Activity Questions 1. People interact by typing statements followed by an <ENTER> 2. Communication is linear, informal, and a combination of one-to-one and one-to-many 3. Terms following the pound sign (#) are commands (e.g. #topic, #info, #startmeeting, etc.) 4. Highlighting a person's name in blue helps draw that person's attention so a message doesn't get lost in the traffic.

I observed the Sahana project channel for 36 hours and there was activity with persons logging on and exiting. There was no communication.

Responses to Project Anatomy Activity Questions 1. Serving as a developer appears to have the most up-front investment in time before one can be contributing to the Sahana Eden project. There are suggestions for things to be done for both developers and designers. Developers contribute by creating and modifying code. Testers run test cases to help increase reliability whereas designers contribute to the appearance and front-end experience of the user. In the SugarLabs project, testing is done under the developer role. Developers and designers serve similar roles between the two.

2. The tracker feature is handled directly on the Sahana web site whereas the SugarLabs version is located in GitHub. Various reports are available on issues identified in the Sahana project. Active issues can be defects, enhancements, or tasks. The entries list the following: summary, component, version, type, owner, status, and date created.

3. The Sahana release cycle and road map indicate the planned releases and respective features to be contained within each. I wonder whether or not this project is still active as some of the content appears to be outdated or the project is far behind original intended schedule.

Part B - FOSS Field Trip Activity

    Part 1: SourceForge

I researched the forges and OpenHub sites. The following are my responses to the questions asked in the activity: 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.). Searched ‘bible’ 3. How many projects are there in this category? 232 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. C++, Java, PHP, Python 6. Identify the meaning of each of the statuses below: 1. Inactive - not being supported 2. Mature - have been developed to a significant extent 3. Production/Stable – reliable 4. Beta - testing 5. Alpha - preliminary 6. Pre-Alpha – early 7. Planning - planning stages 7. Compare two projects in this category that have two different statuses. Describe the differences between the statuses. Bible SuperSearch is in production/stable status. It was last updated 5 days ago. It has many features and support options. It has been downloaded multiple times. Talking Bible Project is in alpha status. It has not been modified since 02/21/2013. There is no support available. It has only been downloaded one time. 8. Which projects are the most used? How do you know? Zefania XML Bible Markup Language has 666 weekly downloads. Siswati Bible for Android has 116 weekly downloads. The number of weekly downloads is indicated in the search results. 9. Pick a project in your category. Answer the questions below: “Read the Bible” 1. What does it do? Enables you to read and search in many translations of the bible. 2. What programming language is the project written in? C++ 3. Who is likely to use the project? How do you know this? Advanced End Users, Religion, End Users/Desktop; Indicated under “Intended Audience” 4. When was the most recent change made to the project? 6/20/2016 5. How active is the project? How can you tell? Fairly active. It has 23 downloads this week. 6. How many committers does the project have? One main person has been involved in the recent updates. 7. Would you use the project? Why or why not? Sure. It seems like it is popular and reliable. 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. For the OpenMRS Core project, identify when the data in OpenHub was last analyzed and the last commit date. How much difference is there? Last analyzed 22 days ago. Last commit was two months ago. Five week difference. 4. What is the main programming language used in OpenMRS Core? Java 5. How many lines of code does OpenMRS Core have? 3.73 million 6. Click on the OpenMRS Core logo or link in upper left. (Be careful not to click on the OpenMRS link associated with the "claimed by" as this brings you to the larger OpenMRS project page.)

7. Click on "User & Contributor Locations" (lower right side of screen). List some of the locations of the developers. Hangs up and does not update. 8. Go back to the main OpenMRS page. Click on the "Languages" link. How many languages is OpenMRS written in? 15 9. What language has the second highest number of lines of code? JavaScript 10. Of the programming languages used in OpenMRS , which language the has the highest comment ratio? Java 11. Click on the “Contributors” link under "SCM Data" menu. 12. What is the average number of contributors in the last 12 months? Around 10 13. Scroll down to the Top Contributors section. How long have the top three contributors been involved in the project? Over 5 years, over 3 years, and over 5 years. 14. 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?. 103 total/12 months = 8.83 commits per month. • If you would like to see a project that has had recent student activity, repeat the above with "MouseTrap".

    Part 2: Project Evaluation Activity

The OpenMRS project is ideal for many courses in our software engineering program and at least one course in our computer information systems program. Although the OpenMRS project is large in scale, students can work on individual modules, address individual bugs, write feature requests. These activities can be focused in scale and are applicable in several courses spanning from introductory programming to software engineering, to verification and validation, to project management. The activity in OpenMRS is current (8 to 10 commits per month) and the project is quite popular (over 72,000 downloads in the past year). There are thriving discussion groups and daily IRC activity. There are multiple on ramps for students to get involved.

The project also appears to be ideally suitable in that students could start out by addressing one or more bug fixes in an early course and there exists detailed information (in the form of curated issues) so students can start with confidence. There exists a high amount of guidance in the form of Wiki Spaces, OpenMRS Talk (forums), IRC Chat, group meetings and even training opportunities. The operating processes are clearly explained and highly detailed. There is excellent support by the community with strong responses to questions on the same day they are asked.

    Part B Number 4: FOSS in Courses Planning 1

The software engineering program has a course entitled Software Quality Assurance planned. The course description is: “Testing methods, verification, and validation of software to ensure its performance and adherence to customer specifications. Evaluation strategies, test planning, and methods for component and system-level emphases to ensure quality software products.” I am thinking that developing and running a test plan for a feature in the Sahana project might be a good summative activity. Specifying requirements for a feature might also be a good fit for the course entitled Software Engineering. The activity described at http://foss2serve.org/index.php/Requirements_Analysis appears to be a good one that merits investigation.