[Systers-dev] GSOC Systers wishlist project

[Sara D]

Hello,

Thank you for the responses. I'm excited at the possibility of working on
one of these projects. I have a decent amount of experience testing and
debugging code and a little theoretical background about test driven
development.

I have just a few questions:

1. I think I read somewhere that we are allowed to apply to more than one
project at a given organization. Is this true? Also, would you rather us
focus on one project or apply to more than one?

2. I plan on having my proposal draft(s) near completion at the end of the
day tomorrow (EST). Would someone be able to review them for me before
Friday? If yes, should I just send them using form on the Google Summer of
Code website or should I send them to this list?

That's all for now. I'm working on setting up the development environment to
begin playing around and getting familiar with that.

Thank you,
Sara

On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 11:32 PM, Robin Jeffries <robin at jeffries.org> wrote:

> I'll chime in here.  Everyone is going to be testing -- though these are
> likely to be manual tests, unless the testing automation project proceeds
> really quickly.  We are going to use a methodology called "test driven
> development", where you have to think about the (unit) tests (purists would
> say, write the tests) before you write the code.   Don't worry.  Most
> students aren't exposed to these ideas, or even how to test (or how to
> debug
> well) in their classes -- this is one of the advantages of being in GSOC.
>  Your future employer and your future open source projects will appreciate
> you coming in understanding the importance of testing.
>
> For the wishlist project, that means describing one or more test cases that
> someone else could use to determine whether you really fixed the bug, and
> doing this before you fix the bug (or at least so close in time that we
> can't tell the actual order you did them -- but I can tell if you only test
> the change you made, rather than testing the problem reported in the bug
> report, really, I can :-)  If you are interested in seeing a bit more what
> this means, our current testing matrix is at:
> http://systers.org/systers-dev/doku.php/master_checklist_template
>
> I'm a UI/HCI person, and some of the small features included in the
> wishlist
> project have some simple UI design requirements, and chance to learn/put to
> work your html and javascript skills.  It's not a UI project (our "real" UI
> project is the UI for the archives, but I suspect you need a couple years
> more class work before you should tackle something like that), but it will
> get you a feeling for why UI design is both important and hard.
>
> Robin
>
> On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 8:16 PM, Erica Wolfe <ericawolfe at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi Anne,
> >
> > Thanks so much for the post.  I, too, am interested in the wishlist items
> > and bug fix project.
> >
> > On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 9:36 AM, Anne Gunn <ompeag at wyoming.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Programming has always been about
> > >   communication, after all, and now with usability becoming such a big
> > >   issue/barrier to progress, our discipline can use all the knowledge
> of
> > >   human factors we can get.
> > >
> >
> > Your words of encouragement are heartening.  I always hope my BA in
> > Sociology from University of Michigan will be handy.  :)
> >
> >  One thing I would hope/encourage us to develop during this project is
> > >   some level of unit testing.  Python offers a couple of different
> > >   approaches to unit testing, depending on how formal and automated you
> > >   want to get.  Although unit testing is generally talked about in
> terms
> > >   of greenfield (new code) development, I've had very good luck
> applying
> > >   it to existing bodies of code.  The interesting thing about fixing
> bugs
> > >   and/or adding features to relatively large bodies of code is that the
> > >   change itself is often relatively straightforward but the unintended
> > >   side effects can be remarkable and varied.  Unit/regression testing
> > >   allows you to begin to get some telemetry on whether or not you broke
> > >   something else while you fixed the thing you intended.  It's an
> > >   imperfect art and when you start doing it with a legacy code base,
> you
> > >   are certain to never have enough tests, but 'Don't let the fear that
> > >   testing can't catch all bugs stop you from writing the tests that
> will
> > >   catch most bugs.'  -- Martin Fowler.
> > >
> >
> > As I'm new to programming, and testing has not been covered at all in my
> > coursework, I'm interested in how, or whether, you see this working with
> > the
> > GSOC project on patches, release and testing automation.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Erica
> >
> >
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