[Opensource] Discussion: Walkthrough Committee

[Lirian Ostrovica]

Bravo Mike,

I think Expresso needs a slow down for a while, have a look back, and nicely pave
the way till to the present.
Making Expresso more friendly and more robust, will for sure result in a widen
community.
I personally would love to contribute, but it is almost impossible for now.

Hope more people support the idea

Lirian



Michael Rimov wrote:

> Hey All,
>
> Just a thought here....
>
> As Lirian and others have voiced, the Expresso code base could use
> additional cleanup.  To be honest, I only see the possibility of this
> happening by doing a series of code walk-throughs.  I, personally, believe
> this is beneficial from a security standpoint as well since the OpenBSD has
> proven time and time again that such practices significantly increase the
> security of the software.
>
> So, if we did something like this, what would it look like?  How would
> meetings happen?  How often, how much, etc?
>
> I suggest that something along the lines of a minimum of a 3 people meeting
> that took place once a month and would entail a walk-though of probably
> only one class at a time.  Depending on the size of the class the group
> could decide to tackle more than one class as well.
>
> Pre-meeting tasks:
> -Have somebody with Jalopy reformat the code for the class we're going to
> look at.  This would provide a standard format that we could all agree on.
>
> -Somebody goes through the class and walks through the javadocs on the
> class and adds what they do understand.  Leave '????' for javadocs on
> undocumented classes/functions that don't make sense at a casual glance.
>
> Meeting Tasks:  Generalized walkthrough the code.  If nobody understands
> the code being looked at, the goal of the walkthrough is to just understand
> it at first and javadoc it.  Look for code cleanup.  Look for updating unit
> tests, etc.
>
> Quorum:  As I said, I think 3 people groups are probably a good idea.  For
> a distributed project and all our wild schedules, I don't really see being
> able to corral more folks at once than that.  That doesn't mean only 3
> people have to sign up for walkthroughs!  Depending on skill level with the
> code, folks could 'tag along', others could form their own group... or
> having additional people would help provide a 'pool' of people that could
> meet at a particular time, thus helping to ensure the meetings happen :)
>         Each group would have to have a committer on board.  [Major Contributor
> and higher], and that person makes changes as suggested.  Anything that
> isn't a 'quick fix' should be added to the Expresso task list for
> fixing/refactoring for for the next release.
>
> How do we prioritize the classes to walk through?  There was an interesting
> Dr. Dobbs article about somebody tracking down the classes that most likely
> need walkthrough's simply by running standard code metrics against various
> classes and computing a 'complexity' number.  Higher complixity classes
> should be walked through first.  This should help yield the highest number
> of bug fixes.
>
> How do we meet?  That depends... we could MSN or AIM... there's a few UNIX
> folks out there that could donate the use of an IRC server.  Or if somebody
> wanted to donate a 'conference call' system for use, that would be great
> too.  This would be something to hash out.
>
> Anyway, I think things like this could greatly assist the Expresso code
> base.  By only taking once class a month, we being a slow but steady effort
> to clean things up, and by prioritizing our walkthroughs we could get the
> worst offenders first.  Best of all, participants would get thorough
> knowledge of one class at a time, and since.
>
> Reporting:  Probably it would be best if the findings of the walkthrough
> were posted to the list.  We could agree on a general template so that
> folks would only have to fill in the blanks.
>
> Implementation Timeline:  I would like to start this probably after the
> release of 5.1 [or at least begin it well into the 'ea' schedule].
>
> So, the question is, what do you guys think of this, if we did this, who
> would volunteer, and finally what could be done to make this more efficient?
>
> Feedback appreciated!
>                                                         -Mike
>
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