Code Inspection

Objective

Practice testing, code inspection and other quality engineering practices on a realistic example.

Description

First you need to select an open source project. We will perform code inspections as well as unit-level and system-level tests for part of the system. Here are some places to find open source projects:

You must choose a project that you can compile and run from source code. You will need to make source code changes and demonstrate changed system functionality.

For this activity, each student needs to identify a section of the source code of the chosen project to inspect. It could be a module, a class, a function, or some segment of code that can be understood independently from the rest of the system. It should be between 100 and 300 lines of code (including comments). Once you have identified the section of code to inspect, make exactly 10 minor modifications to the code that you know will be errors. The errors should not result in compilation errors. They may be errors in poor coding style, mistakes in algorithms, unsafe programming practices, or semantic errors. Don't tell the other students in the course about the changes you made! They will need to find them as part of another activity. Submit the following 3 files separately to the Activity 1 dropbox:

  1. The original section of code as a plain text file.
  2. The modified section of code as a plain text file.
  3. A description of the changes you made in a doc or plain text file. Also include any notes on how to get this code to build and run.