Software Archeology @ RIT
Hi! I’m Katherine Whitlock, a second year Software Engineering Major. I’m also minoring in Japanese. My (tentative) concentration is Embedded/Lowlevel Systems, and I have an interest in programming language theory and design. I’m a bit of a programming polyglot, but my preferred languages are Ruby, Common Lisp, and C/C++.
This is my first research proejct, so I’m rather inexperienced, but I hope to learn a lot about software archeology, the research process and how large-scale groups (the Chromium project) develop software effectively. Thus far, we’ve been reading through the internal communications that the developers have in issues and in the code reviews.
Recently we’ve been looking at the Rietveld API, and how to grab all the data we want from it in JSON. I think this would be preferable to screen-scraping the data, as we have it in the same format that Rietveld does, and can handle it as such.
This project is particularly interesting to me as I’m a large propent of open source software, and the Chromium project is one of my favorites, so I’m curious to see how work is done under the hood by developers, and how issues get resolved efficiently.
Code reviews seem to be an often overlooked component of projects, and having research that focuses on them is important, as it allows for a comparisons and correlations to be drawn that might otherwise be ignored.
I’m really excited to see where this projects leads
This project is sponsored by the Collaborative Research Experiences for Undergraduates, funded by the National Science Foundation.