[Qgis-developer] Fwd: [GRASS5] New GRASS Quality Control System online]

[Tim Sutton]

Hi

Very interesting - I wonder if they would let us try out QGIS in there too....

Regards

Tim

On 3/31/06, Mateusz Łoskot <mateusz at loskot.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Regarding Tim's proposal about how to make development organization
> better and QGIS less buggy, here is the post about New GRASS QCS.
> It may be interesting to bring new ideas for QGIS.
> Cheers
> Mateusz
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Markus Neteler <neteler itc.it>
> Date: Mar 31, 2006 4:31 PM
> Subject: [GRASS5] New GRASS Quality Control System online
> To: grass developers list <grass5 grass.itc.it>
>
> Dear GRASS developers and interested users,
>
> as you know, GRASS is a huge system with thousands of files and
> hundreds of thousands of lines of code. You are contributing to the
> development - but do you sometimes wonder how quality is ensured in
> such a big project? Sure, there is the commit mailing list which shows
> changes in real time. But probably more could be done.
>
> Today we want to propose a new system to you:
> At Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal a new software quality control
> system has been developed which checks the CVS changes as distributed
> by the GRASS commit mailing list for potential problems. We would like
> to invite you to try this new GRASS source code quality monitoring
> service. We, that are Giulio Antoniol, Ettore Merlo, Salah Bouktif and
> Markus Neteler. Based on Free Software tools and the software
> engineering knowledge of the people of Ecole Polytechnique de
> Montreal, this quality assessment system was realized as combined
> email notifier and Web dashboard.
>
> So, what do you and the GRASS project gain from that? Three principal
> services are provided to you and the community:
>
> - The first service analyzes and controls the complexity increase and
>   potential quality declining;
>
> - The second supports distributed developers to perform safe evolution
>   by sending them a feedback report after each contribution in order to
>   avoid abnormal actions;
>
> - The third allows developers to learn about the big picture of the
>   whole software by providing them with a dashboard of the project
>   evolution.
>
> What could go wrong? The *first service* checks if new functions or
> modifications are getting too complex which renders them
> unmaintainable. The service also checks if a modified function,
> probably written by someone else, is already too complex and should
> better broken into pieces. Finally it checks if functions are cloned,
> i.e. that several code pieces are identical or nearly identical. In
> this case such clones should be removed (e.g. by moving the function
> to the related GRASS library).
>
> As *second service* this report is sent to the developer shortly after
> each CVS modification. Memory is still fresh and the developer is
> invited to act upon a newly introduced problem or invited to attack an
> old outstanding problem with legacy code in GRASS.
>
> The *third service* is a Web site which provides easy code navigation
> to better study clones or complex functions (we call them "baby
> monsters" or "monsters" and put them into the "monster garage" there
> for inspection). Also detailed graphs will be generated to better
> illustrate the problems identified.
>
> It is our goal to make the services a help and understandable even to
> the "hobby" programmer. And of course, to help to improve the code
> quality. Better code is easier to maintain - so please give the system
> a try.
>
> To receive the code monitoring messages of your contributions, please
> just send a mail to Markus that you are interested. To take a look at
> the dashboard, check here:
>
> http://web.soccerlab.polymtl.ca/grass-evolution/grass-browsers/grass-index-en.html
>
> To log into the GRASS restricted, enter:
> User: grass  (pw: "grass6")
>
> Our plan in the long term is to develop personalized services and
> different views for different developers. This is a beta test and we
> need your help to identify weaknesses and possible enhancements.
>
> For example, as suggested by Ettore, we could easily implement a
> service to check files/functions for quality indexes before performing
> the actual CVS commit, kind of preventive verification.
>
> We are happy to give more feedback! Let us know or simply try the
> new system out.
>
> Best regards
>
>  Markus
>
> in collaboration with and grateful to:
>   Giulio Antoniol <antoniol AT ieee.org>
>   Salah Bouktif <salah.bouktif AT polymtl.ca>
>   Ettore Merlo <ettore.merlo AT polymtl.ca>
>
> _______________________________________________
> grass dev mailing list
> grass5 at grass.itc.it
> http://grass.itc.it/mailman/listinfo/grass5
>
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>
> --
> Mateusz Łoskot
> http://mateusz.loskot.net
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--
Tim Sutton

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