Software Archeology @ RIT
Last Week
My main point of focus last week was looking at the relationship between OWNERS and the reviewers of the code inspections. It is a policy of Chromium, mentioned here, that every inspection must be reviewed by at least one OWNER of the files being altered in the commit. Based on that, we compilied a list of possible questions to be answered over the course of the project:
- Was the policy upheld? Meaning, is it true that every inspection is reviewed by an OWNER of the code?
- How beneficial is this policy? Is an inspection with an OWNER less likely to introduce a vulnerability than one without?
- If more OWNERS look over an inspection, is it less likely to introduce a vulnerability?
- What happens if an OWNER leaves the project?
Although some of these questions are still be investigated, we have found some interesting facts. 90.23% of OWNERS have committed at least once within the last year. From this, we can assume that OWNERS tend to stick around and be involved in the project for the long term.
This Week
This week we decided to separate into two sub-teams, Scraper and Analysis Tools.
The Scraper team will be comprised of Katherine and Danielle. Last week we contacted Chromium about how to better attain the necessary data for our project, but their infrastructure team has yet to get back to us. So, we are planning on moving forward with The Scraper.
The Analysis Tools team will be Chris, Alberto, and myself (Shannon). Katherine mentioned in her Week 6 Post that we were planning on using Active Record for ORM. We have decided to use Rails, but without the web app component. Once we have data to begin analysis on, this task will really take off!
Next Week
Now that we know what data we want to collect, and how we plan on collecting it, we can move forward with the Scraper and getting that to run. Once that is up and going we can wait for it to finish and begin to work more heavily on analyzing our findings.
This project is sponsored by the Collaborative Research Experiences for Undergraduates, funded by the National Science Foundation.