User:TWahls

Revision as of 15:55, 1 May 2016

Tim Wahls is an Associate Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Dickinson College. The computer science program at Dickinson currently has 3.5 faculty members and 67 students as declared majors.

Dr. Wahls's research interests are in programming languages and formal software engineering methods, currently focussed on the development of code generation tools for B and Event-B. Three of these tools have been incorporated into open-source projects, notably the EventB2SQL tool, which generates Java, PHP and Android applications from Event-B models. He is also the project administrator and lead developer for FARMDATA, an open-source record keeping system for organic produce farms.

Answers to IRC questions:

• The interactions seems to be very similar to that found in an (informal) face-to-face meeting - free flowing discussion with light direction from the moderator.
• The communication is relatively linear and informal. There is a mix of one-to-one and one-to-many (at times verging on many-to-many) discussion.
• I don't really observe any terms with meanings beyond the ordinary English ones (other than the obvious MeetBot commands).
• The tone of the conversation is very friendly and supportive.
• Answer to bonus question: looks like only the moderator can issue MeetBot commands.

Summary of IRC monitoring: I am currently monitoring the #OpenMRS IRC feed. Not much has happened yet - just a little discussion of the IRC page itself and how to create an ID. I will update this paragraph as more occurs.

Answers to Guided Tour Questions (Sugar Project):

• Roles most applicable to students would include: developer, translator (we have many international students) and content writer (many of our students are double majors and could likely contribute content in a non-technical area at a level appropriate for children). These roles are all rather different: development is straight up computer science/software engineering, translation relies on fluency in multiple human languages, and writing content would not require technical or foreign language skills.
• Bugs are reported by submitting a bug report to the bug tracker system. Bugs become work tickets. It appears that a user must register for an account in order to submit a bug report. Ticket types include defect, enhancement and task. The information available for each ticket includes ticket number, summary, status, owner, type, priority and milestone.
• The Sugar code repository is clearly web-based, as evidenced by the fact that I can browse the code via my web browser.
• The Roadmap lays out a schedule for releases and freeze points, including tickets considered for the release. I think this is related to including features requested via the tickets in the release, and "freezing" addition of new features etc. while those to be included in the next release are completed and tested.

Answers to Guided Tour Questions (Sahana Project):