SCORE Project: Distributed Software Development
Title: Team and Source Code Overview
Sponsor: Claudia Szabo
Understanding and visualising the changes that your team-mates are doing on common project work is crucial for a well-functioning team. In distributed software engineering projects, where team members are geographically separated across continents, such understanding becomes fundamental and is not always easy to obtain. This project aims to develop a platform to help students working in distributed software engineering projects to have a better overview what their team is working on through the use of the Distributed Software Development Overview (DSDO).
Project Description
The DSDO will give students working on the distributed software engineering project an overview of who is working on particular parts of the code, what tasks are associated to each file, and who is responsible for each file, as well as the working patterns for each individual, to allow for better communication. For example, student Smith might be responsible for a file, but she is working from Australia, therefore, only online between particular times. The DSDO program will run as an overlay over an IDE and will be continuously updated as changes happen to the code and responsibilities get allocated.
The information shown on the overlay must include but is not limited to:
- commit statistics;
- who is working on what parts of the code;
- how long team members have been working on it;
- how long they have been online;
- code quality statistics: how many build breaks each team-member has, how many compile errors each team-member has accumulated, how complex their code is, how many LOC of changes added.
You are responsible for the design and implementation of a system that would allow for all this information to be available – specifically, beyond using a public repository, you would have to come up with methods and communication protocols that would allow the DSDO to determine who is online, for how long, whether they have broken the build etc.
Project Scope
Your project needs to support all the features described above, but is not limited to them.
The choice of platform is up to you, including whether the code editor should be a standalone IDE or a web-based IDE. Teams are expected to be or become familiar with the main guidelines for developing applications for the chosen platform.
No "fancy" UI is required for DSDO. However, teams should conform to the human-interface guidelines of the chosen platform and document this conformance with examples in the project report.
Process Requirements
Teams are free to choose the development process; however, this choice should be motivated and discussed in the project report. The project artifacts should be hosted on a public repository (such as GitHub or Bitbucket), to track the project activity (including bug reports and bug fixes).
Environmental Constraints
The DSDO should run on any platform. If a standalone editor is chosen as opposed to web-based editors, then that too should run on any platform.
Level of Sponsor Involvement
The sponsor of this project will accept questions about the project topic during the periods:
- 1 March 2015 to 15 March 2015;
- 1 Jun 2015 to 15 Jun 2015;
- 1 Sep 2015 to 15 Sep 2015.
At least by the end of each of these periods (but possibly sooner), selected questions deemed important by the sponsor will be gathered and answered in a FAQ at the bottom of this page. Questions not appearing on the FAQ will not be answered, and teams will have to make their own assumptions for those questions; assumptions have to be included in the project report.
Sponsor contact: claudia (dot) szabo (at) adelaide (dot) edu (dot) au
Project Restrictions
None.
Project FAQ
Answers to selected questions will appear here.