User:Jfrench

Revision as of 22:06, 8 September 2015

Jean (Jeannie) H. French

Jean H. French, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computing Sciences at Coastal Carolina University (CCU). CCU is a public, liberal arts institution minutes from Myrtle Beach, SC. CCU offers undergraduate, graduate, and Ph.D. programs to nearly 10,000 students. The Department of Computing Sciences offers Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science, Information Systems, and Information Technology.

Dr. French's main areas of teaching are in Web programming, multimedia, and data sciences. Classroom projects often involve real-world problems for students to solve for the university or industry. Dr. French is highly involved in academic assessment as chair of departmental assessment and ABET accreditation, and also as chair of assessment for all university academic programs. Dr. French also serves as the vice chair of Faculty Senate.

When not teaching and assessing, she is busy raising her two little girls (4 and 6) with her husband. Though she enjoys living in Myrtle Beach, she is one of six children from Boston, Mass. and enjoys heading home to visit family.

BEGIN STAGE 1 - PART A: Due August 6th ******************************************************************************

Stage 1 - Part A - Intro IRC Activity

Part 1 How do people interact? The interaction was polite and informal conversation with questions, answers, comments, 'at-a-boy confirmations, and some emoticons.

What is the pattern of communication? Is it linear or branched? Formal or informal? One-to-many, one-to-one or a mix? The pattern of communication is informal and branched with mostly one-to-many. For example, informal speech was mentioned in the previous question. The conversation was branched because in the middle of a related thread of comments, there were side comments like "Sorry, Firefox creashed" by Heidi. The conversation was mostly one-to-many because one might have a question, but the others chimed in with suggestions.

Are there any terms that seem to have special meaning? info, action, topic all seem to have special meanings and these terms were evaluated in a special way in the final PDF meeting notes.

What advantages might IRC have over other real-time communication methods (like Google Chat or Facebook Messenger?) Are there potential disadvantages? While I used the Firefox browser plug-in, it was not necessary. There were a number of ways to connect to the conversation. The disadvantage is that this is only text-based. Except for texting content, there was no additional way to convey information such as images, video, or sound.

Can you make any other observations? I noticed that it looked like if a user wanted to get the attention of a particular user, they would type the name of that user.

Bonus question: Why didn't Heidi and Darci's actions get picked up by the meetbot? I really don't see this. There were three #action notes in the conversation by users darci and heidi. All three were included in the meeting summary PDF 18:12:58 <darci> #action amber will try graphviz This was indicated in the summary at 1.c. 18:51:28 <heidi> #action Heidi look into the status of releases in the next week. This was indicated in the summary at 1.h. 19:06:06 <darci> #action Darci will find John some easy Python projects to work on. This was indicated in the summary at 2.a.

For Part 2: N/A

For Part 3: I connected to the Mousetrap IRC. There were no active conversations when I was logged in, but I reviewed a number of the logs. There do not appear to be many users in any of the logs and the most active user is stoney. During one meeting, users kevin-brown and heidie had little to report, but also not much feedback to user stoney. User stoney had over 20 entries (from 17:06:33 to 17:13:28) with no response from either of the other users and user stoney pointed out the "silence." During one of the logs, it appeared to be a meeting with only stoney and the log seemed not to be used for conversation, but as a record of individual activity. The act of ending the meetings seems to just be an end meeting command with no confirmation that the meeting is about to end. It appears if some minutes have gone by without activity that the meeting is simply ended without comments about the next meeting. I suspect there must be other ways the users are communicating???

Part 4 (optional): N/A

Stage 1 - Part A - Project Anatomy Activity

SUGAR LABS PROJECT

Summary of Contact Pages: None of the teams had contacts cross-listed (each team had unique members). All three teams used and IRC Channel. In addition, the Documentation Team and the Activity Team had a mailing list. Development & Documentation both are without coordinators.

Activity Team: The activity team is responsible for keeping track of all of the activities available. This includes finding and working with developers and other teams. They can't just have random activities from different people. Though they encourage developers, they provide resources and oversight for the organized development of Sugar.

Development Team: The development team is responsible for actually building the Sugar environment. This includes working to fix any problems in addition to adding new features that need to be added to Sugar.

Documentation Team: The Documentation Team is responsible for creating and updating the user manuals. They need to have different versions of the manuals in different languages. For example, they are working on a Spanish version for the Sugar FLOSS manual.

Tracker: There are three types of categories listed: defect, enhancement, and task. The "task" category is only listed once. A majority of the tickets are for defects. Ticket information includes what appears to be a unique number, a summary, status of the ticket (new, assigned, reopened, and accepted). The ticket also includes an owner username, the type (as previously described), a priority and whether the ticket has to do with a particular milestone (if not, it it left as unspecified).

Repository: It is local. After viewing the Webpage source code, it provided URLs such as git://git.sugarlabs.org/sugar-base/mainline.git. When I simplified and went to git.sugarlabs.org, it shows that they are using Gitorious that states "Gitorious is a great way of collaborating on distributed open source projects." When I went to http://www.gitorious.com/, you can see that there are managed server and local install installation options. Since the source code shows git.sugarlabs.org, it looks like they opted with installing it on their own servers under the sugarlabs.org domain.

Release Cycle: The roadmap is updates at the beginning of each release cycle. The release team is responsible for the release cycle that determines the updating of Development Team's Roadmap.

THE SAHANA EDEN PROJECT

Summary of groups: When comparing the teams, it wasn't directly clear who was helping to keep the various development pieces organized. There is a Coding Tasks list that is open for individuals to pick and choose what they want to work on. The information is not as consistent on this website. For example, the Designers page makes no mention of the communication methods used, where the developers had IRC and mailing list information readily available.

Tracker: The tracker page first shows categories and then you need to click on the categories to find the list of individual tickets. For example, there was a category titled "My Tickets" which would (I assume) list only the tickets related to me (had I had any tickets in the system).

Active Tickets: The Active Tickets page shows the list of active tickets by a unique number. There is a summary. In addition, there is the component related to the ticket (Web, CSS, GIS, etc), a version (most are categorized as trunk tickets), the priority, the owner, the status, and the date the ticket was created. Some rows of tickets are highlighted in blue.

Repository: It is local. The installation directions specifically states navigating to the localhost after installation.

Release Cycle: There appear to be three named projects and release numbers. Two don't have dates and one says it is four years late. There is a tracking graphic that shows what percentage the release is in terms of being completed (it also shows the tickets associated for further information on the percentage complete. The page also shows a list of different modules/activities that are included in each.

END STAGE 1 - PART A: Due August 6th *******************************************************************************

Stage 1 - Part B: FOSS Field Trip

PART 1: SourceForge

Topic: Video Editing

Categories: 2079

Languages: C++(79); Java(342); C(239); C#(202); Python(99); JavaScript(90); PHP(87); Visual Basic .NET(69); Delphi/Kylix(57); Assembly(29); Perl(25); Unix Shell(23); Lazarus(22); Matlab(20); Visual Basic(20)

Top 4 Programming Languages: C++, Java, C, C#

Meanings of Statues: According Koper-Capodistria (2013), The SourceForge statuses indicate levels of progress of software development using a numbering system from 1 - 7. In order of progress, the statuses are planning, alpha, beta, and stable. The statuses are upgraded with "improvements in completeness, consistency, testability, usability, and reliablitiy". Inactive projects are those not included in the other status designations as there is either no code available or a lack of developers to work on the code. Koper-Capodistria further states that SourceForge leaves it up to developers to determine whether the project is pre-Alpha vs Alpha or Production/Stable vs Mature as there are "only vague definitions" of the categories. Koper-Capodistria, S. (2013). Open source software: Quality verification. Proceedings of the 9th IFIP WG 2.13 International Conference (OSS 2013). Available from books.google.com.

Comparison of Categories: I compared "Planning" and "Mature" statuses. It was surprising that a number of projects in the "planning" stage had not been updated in years. There was one project that was registered in 2006, but was last updated in 2012. I don't quite know why it was abandoned and moved to Inactive. This makes me wonder what really qualifies for inactive. For the ones I checked in the planning stage, there were no downloads in the downloads "This Week" section. There were some with a "browse code" option, though. For the mature projects, the ones I checked had more recent (as in even recent weeks) updates. There were useful user reviews (up to 5-stars) and a download option. The descriptions were also more developed.

Projects Most Used: First, I'll note that even though I entered "video editing" in the search, the results were not limited to projects that actually edited video. Some were video players, others sound editors. I chose the sort by "most popular" to determine which were the most used. Some of these products had tens of thousands of downloads in a week (one had over 100,000 downloads).

Project in My Category: I chose the "DVDStyler" project in the video editing category. The link is http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvdstyler/

What does it do? The DVDStyler is a DVD authoring program that "makes possible for video enthusiasts to create professional-looking DVDs." It includes DVD menus, templates, and options to select format, and basic editing features.

Programming language? C++

Who likely to use? Users are those who want to create DVDs. The description says this and so do the user reviewer comments.

Most recent change? The most recent change was 6 days ago, so the developers are active. More specifically, the developers closed a bunch of tickets on August 5th that addressed some older problems that were fixed, so the dates are not quite accurate. The wiki doesn't have much information. There is a link to the project's external site, but it is marked as having malicious software by my security. There are also reviews that say the software itself has malware, so I'm not going to dig any deeper. If I were looking for this type of software I wouldn't download it.

Committers? I cannot find anyone other than user ntalex (Alex Theuring) on any of the documentation.

Would use? As mentioned before, this software looks dangerous, thus I wouldn't use it. If I can't even safely go to the website to read more, I'm definitely going to avoid it. I'm a regular user of SorceForge and I've never come across software that was so sketchy. I was surprised. One reviewer stated "@sourceforge - Really? You're going to allow this?" and I agree with that surprise and frustration.

Part 2 - OpenHub Programming Language: Java

Lines of Code: 1,886,909

USERS Locations: Indianapolis, IN, USA (Ben), Cape Town, South Africa (Simon Kelly), Ho Chi Minh-byen, Vietnam (Kim Anh Vo)

Number of languages: 15

Language with second-highest lines of code: JavaScript

Language with highest comment ratio: Java

CONTRIBUTORS What is the average number of contributors in the last 12 months? No July 2015 numbers, so used July 2014 through June 2015

July 18

August 10

September 9

October 16

November 12

December 16

January 17

February 12

March 16

April 18

May 11

June 7

Approximately 13 average users.

How long have the top three contributors been involved in the project? The top two contributors (dkayiwa and raff) have been with the project for over four years. The third top (wyclif) contributor has been with the project for almost two years.

Compute the 12-month average of commits. No July 2015 numbers, so used July 2014 through June 2015

July 143

August 43

September 30

October 85

November 84

December 57

January 92

February 79

March 92

April 92

May 82

June 63

Average commits approximately 79 per month.

Comparison to MouseTrap: Just a quick comparison. This project users only 5 languages versus the 15 that are used for OPENMRS. It has 250,455 lines of code versus 1,886,909. It has only 31 commits in the last 12 months. This project had a peat in commits in 2014, but very little activity since (single digits).

Project Evaluation Activity TBA

Blogging Activity TBA

Foss in Courses Planning 1 TBA

Stage 1 - Part B: Project Evaluation Activity

Walk through of an evaluation of the OpenMRS project

MISSION CRITICAL CRITERIA - VIABILITY

Size/Scale/Complexity - Though the video mentions a project with approximately 6 active contributors is a good number and that much more would be too complex to learn, I would give the top score of 3 for OpenMRS in this category even though OpenMRS has approximately twice the active contributors suggested. The reasons are that the developer documentation states there are "over 50 active projects." Since there is not one massive program written, it would seem that there would be some flexibility in finding a fit with so many projects available. In addition, the developer documentations says that "when looking at the development of code for the OpenMRS core software, you'll find lots of collaboration." With good collaboration, there will be a way to further understand the project and the needs and to get feedback. Finally, OpenMRS supports the use of mentors, which is a wonderful way to help guide new learners.

Activity - The number of commits, according to the video, that is reasonable is 10-30. OpenMRS has over 70 per month. Because this is quite large, I would suggest a score of 3. It is well over the reasonable number demonstrating a very active project. I'll note that the commits has significantly dropped since 2012 and there has been a slight drop in developers. I suspect during higher periods of activity, that the projects were numerous and actively being developed, but fewer resources are now needed for the more developed aspects of the project.

Community - Over the last year, the software has been downloaded between 2700 and 3500 times per month, which looks stable. When viewing the discussion boards, there are some concerns. While some posts are getting views, the ratio of views to responses is quite low. In one question, there were 480 views and only 9 replies. Another question is already 6 days old (old for a developer to be stuck) and there are no responses and 43 views. When reviewing the IRC logs, there are times when people log in and cannot find anyone to respond, but in general there is daily activity. There were some conversations that showed some confusion. Someone asked a question to a specific user and that user wanted to know "what was my last response?" so I think the IRC is not the best way to communicate. Based upon the download history, discussion activity, and IRC activity, I would score this category as a 2.

MISSION CRITICAL CRITERIA - APPROACHABILITY

The documentation for getting started was organized and clear. There was specific mention of various technologies available to get started and links for resources. I would categorize this as ideal. (Score of 3)

MISSION CRITICAL CRITERIA - SUITABILITY Artifacts - Bug fixes: In the two categories of introductory issues, there are two lists. One list has 13 and the other has 39. Not all are bugs. Some are new ideas and others are additions to the project. The process for explaining how to "create an issue" is well-documented, but when it comes to responses and feedback for bugs, too much time goes by. In one post, over 12 days passed before there was a response. I score it as insufficient. (Score of 1).

Contributor Support - As previously mentioned, I don't think the support in the IRC and -especially- the discussion boards is timely enough. I think, regardless of all of the documentation provided, this area is far too lacking for a high score. I score it as insufficient. (Score of 1).

Because one of the mission critical sections was scored lower than a 2, no secondary criteria were evaluated.

Stage 1 - Part B: Blogging Activity

https://drjeanfrench.wordpress.com/

Stage 1 - Part B: FOSS in Courses Planning

Possible Activities My initial thought was that we would not be able to do this easily, but after reading the material, I see beyond contributing to code. This is very encouraging. We would need to start of small. These are some introductory activities I think we can accomplish: Glossary of technical terms Graphics Documentation Testing Interview a FOSS user and find out why they use FOSS, benefits/drawbacks, etc. Shadow a FOSS contributor

Activities for ClassItalic text Documentation - I think helping to create user documentation would be a great way for students to contribute and really learn about the project. This would result in them really getting to know how the projects work.

working on Graphics would be a great project for my Multimedia class. This could even be done in conjunction with the Documentation. A highly-visual documentation (with graphics) could be created.

In your reading, did you find existing materials? If so, describe how would you modify them to fit your class? I went to http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/RIT/The_Course and it mentioned Documentation in Week 7, but when I scrolled down, the link was broken. I tried http://foss2serve.org/index.php/Learning_Activities, but the section on documentation wasn't really user documentation like I was thinking. It did have "document code with meaningful comments" which might be a great post-introductory activity for my class. This page http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Main_Page was too crazy, so when I searched for "documentation" there were no results, which I thought was odd, but if there stuff is too cumbersome to navigate, it will not be good for students either. Moved on...

If you did not find existing materials, summarize the activity in a sentence or two. I didn't, but we can probably create documentation or improve on documentation by actually using the software in a comprehensive manner and creating organized, visually appealing (with graphic examples) documentation.

END of STAGE 1 - Part B: Due August 24th ******************************************************************************