Week 4 - Research and Planning

Last Meeting

Last week we created the first draft of our data collection plan (which Chris talks about in his post here) and got feedback from Meneely at the meeting.

This Week

We looked through a lot of documents in order to better understand the Chromium developer workflow. These should be really helpful in the future. Here are some of the links:

Commit Queue

Top Contributors
Chromium Status
Commit Queue

Responsibilities of Committers and Reviewers

Responsibilities

OWNERS Files

OWNERS Files

Contributing Code

Contributing Code

Chromium Developers Docs

Chromium Dev Doc

From these we made a diagram of the workflow and also created a glossary of terms that we were unsure about.

Through these links we discovered the OWNERS file which are used for deciding who will review a developers patch. These files will be really helpful when we’re trying to gather data about top contributors and who they interact with.

Katherine and Professor Meneely have been experimenting with some scripts for gathering data from the Rietveld API. Here’s a link to our GitHub.

Next Meeting

We will discuss what kind of limitations we want to put on the data we collect. Chromium is such a large project that it would be unrealistic to look through every single commit and it’s corresponding review. After that our next step will be figuring out how to collect the data (see the github).

This project is sponsored by the Collaborative Research Experiences for Undergraduates, funded by the National Science Foundation.