User:Ssheth

Swapneel Sheth

Swapneel Sheth is a Lecturer in the Computer and Information Science department at the University of Pennsylvania.

His research and teaching interests are Software Engineering, Privacy, and the Web.

Stage 1 Part A

Intro to IRC

Part 1

1. How do people interact?
   • In an informal manner
2. What is the pattern of communication?
   • Usually question and answer - somebody has a question or a problem, other tries to help solve it
3. Are there any terms that seem to have special meaning?
   • The chat bot commands
4. Can you make any other observations?
   • It's nice to have the meeting transcribed by meetbot in a relatively easy manner, with annotations

Part 3

I've been following the #ushahidi channel periodically, but it seems to have very little activity.

I've looked at other interesting (to me) open-source channels - #rvm, #ruby-lang, #rubyonrails. These are a lot more active and seem to have two kinds of questions.

1. I'm stuck.. help me with X
   • In this case, people are trying to install/work with some software/framework/library and getting error messages. This seems like a faster, 90s version of StackOverflow for people to get answers.
2. What is a good way to do X?
   • In this case, people are unsure what's a "good" (optimal, efficient, faster, better) way of doing something - A or B. They want advice from the more-seasoned users in the channel. Comparing to StackOverflow, I see this as a big advantage as something "subjective" is not a good question to ask on StackOverflow.

Anatomy of a FOSS Project

The Sugar Labs Project

• Community
  1. Activity Team
     • Develops and Maintains the activities; recruits developers.
     • There are 2 coordinators and a lot of contributors.
  2. Development Team
     • Builds and Maintains the core Sugar Project.
     • There is no coordinator and four people (assuming they're contributors?) listed
  3. Documentation Team
     • Provides high quality documentation (learner's manual, programming references, and tutorials).
     • There is no coordinator here as well and two editors with their areas of speciality listed.
• Tracker
  1. Types/Categories of Tickets
     • Defect, Enhancement, Task
  2. Information available for each ticket
     • The usual bug tracking categories - reported by, priority, component, severity, cc, bug status, owned by, milestone, version, keywords, distro/os, description, change history, timestamps.
• Repository
  • Web-based common repo, but it's git so everything is distributed and everyone has a "local repo".
• Release Cycle
  • The roadmap is updated at the start of each release cycle. Each release cycle contains development, beta, RC, final releases.

The Sahana Eden Project

• Community
  1. Developers
     • This is for people interested in contributing to the development effort of Sahana or for those who want to use Sahana in their own projects.
     • Unlike Sugar Labs, names and roles are not mentioned.
     • Training and guidelines are provided here.
  2. Testers
     • They want three types of testers - non technical users, developers, sysadmins.
     • Again, names and roles are not mentioned.
     • Training and guidelines are provided here as well.
  3. Designers
     • This is for graphic designers who have experience in CSS and HTML.
     • Training and guidelines are provided here as well.
• Tracker
  1. The default page shows reports, instead of tickets.
  2. Types/Categories of Tickets
     • Defect/Bug, Enhancement, Task, Documentation
  3. Information available for each ticket
     • They use Trac as well - so most of the information is similar as Sugar Labs. Reported by, priority, component, keywords, due date, cc, owned by, milestone, version, launchpad bug, description, attachments, change history, timestamps.
• Repository
  • Web-based common repo.
• Release Cycle
  • The current milestone (0.9 Medway) is 90% complete and 3 years late. It still a number of open tickets.
  • The future milestones (1.0 Avon and 2.0) don't have a date set, but they describe the key features required.