Software Archeology @ RIT
Last Week
This past week, some key items we discussed were the data collection plan our team had made, as well as our discovery of OWNERs and AUTHORs files. See Shannon’s post for more detail on our work last week.
This Week
This week we started off by discussing how we are going to gather data for reasearch analysis; we could use Ruby to scrape the open source material, or ask Chromium developers for database access. In the end it was decided that we would ask Chromium developers for access to their data (just code reviews, not bugs and not including original patch sets), but before we request that, we will do a benchmark on JSON scraping. This will give us valuable information in case we need to resort to scraping at a later time.
During the team meeting we also drew out the beginnings of an Entity-Relationship (ER) diagram, which are used for Object-Relational Mapping and databases. Creating the ER diagram will help us to determine how to model all of the data we have in the future. The very rough sketch of the ER diagram can be found here.
Finally, this week we discussed some findings we had last week concerning OWNERs files, AUTHORs files, and Chromium developer roles. A description of OWNERs files can be found on last week’s blog post, and AUTHORs files are essentially a list of names and email address for authors of some code.
Next Week
Next week our major goal is to start data collection, but we also plan to discuss the work everyone has done this week regarding investigations into OWNERs and AUTHORs files, JSON scraping tests, role research, and prototyping.
This project is sponsored by the Collaborative Research Experiences for Undergraduates, funded by the National Science Foundation.