Software Engineering Coursework

[Nikolaus Huber]

(Posting again, since the first one doesn't show up in the group for some reason)

Hello.

I am a second year student from the University of Edinburgh and as part of our second year Software Engineering course (in semester 1) we have to contribute to an open source project.

The coursework is divided into two parts. Part 1 would only focus on me getting the hang of how the program is organized and how it works (code packages, classes) and how the project itself is organized (mailing-lists, bug reports, etc.). This I would be doing largely on my own, sometimes asking if I get stuck.

The for you probably more interesting part is Part 2. Here we actually have to make some contribution. This could be fixing bugs, reporting bugs, writing or improving documentation, developing documentation of the design of the project (UML), improving the design of the system by applying relevant refactorings, answering questions on the projects mailings lists (or forums), adding tests, or any combination of these.

But before I actually decide that I want to contribute to this project, I wanted to ask you, if you think that you have anything of the above mentioned contributions that I could do (as it is hard to later change the project). I am fairly confident in my Java skills (I wrote two small games last year) and C/C++ (I had a two month sommer job programming a CUDA application).

Part 1 would have to be handed in on the 12th October, Part 2 on the 9th November.

I am looking forward to your replies.

[Sean Owen]

Hi Nikolaus, I can certainly comment on what kind of effort would be useful. It's up to you what you think is most interesting and feasible for you and  your course. I can speak to the main (Java) code -- Steven could probably speak for C++.

I don't know if we need UML, or much design refactoring. I also think the mailing list is pretty well covered.

More tests and documentation are always useful; I can be a bit tedious, so I imagine you'll want to make that at most part of your effort.

Some of the open issues may actually be interesting miniature projects. See http://code.google.com/p/zxing/issues/list . 1169 / 1322 are good, low-level PDF417 enhancements. 1265 / 1386 are interesting projects to improve scanning in corner cases. 1351 is a good small Android project.

[Nikolaus Huber]

Hi Sean,

thank you for your answer. I quickly looked at the mentioned issues/little projects you mentioned, and they seem very interesting. I guess, you will here some more of me in the coming weeks when the first questions arise. For the time being I will start on Part 1.