Seminars

Seminar 3 (attendance and active participation is mandatory)

Purpose

The purpose of seminar 3 is to prepare you to make a concrete contribution in a specific project. Given the technical and other requirements for contributing in a specific project, you shall make preparations for a particular contribution requested by a project.

Preparations

Based on the overview of projects from seminars 1, each pair or individual selects one open source project and studies it more closely. You shall identify specific tasks that you would like to contribute to resolving within the project.

• Start by identifying and describing a set of preparatory activities that you believe can be useful to engage in before carrying out code changes to the project. What do you need to learn more about? How can you study the techniques, tools, theoretical underpinnings or algorithms employed in the project before making your own contributions?
• Identifying one or a few minor tasks that are specifically suitable for a new developer who wished to contribute to the project. You should be able to justify why these particular issues are suitable, by referring to their description, conversations with developers in the project or other means. The tasks can involve writing documentation, translating and interface or fixing a minor bug.
• Choose one of the minor task and resolve it and submit it back to the project. (It is ok if your contibution don't get accepted) Describe in detail how you did go about resolving the issue and submitting to the project.
• Give examples of a (set of) final larger contribution(s) that you would like to make to the project based on previous contributions to the project, and currently open issues.
• Make a time plan for those contributions, taking into account time for learning about new techniques that are relevant, as well as the review process for contributions. Make sure to justify your estimates of review time based on earlier reviews, and include concrete activities that you plan to engage in to learn necessary skills to be able to contribute in the project.

During the seminar

At the seminar you will sit down in you teams and show solution for the minor task, and show how a it is submitted back to the project. Describe and review your time plans for making a larger contribution. Make sure to provide feedback on each others plans.

A random group from each team will be selected to present their plans to the other teams. Make sure that you are able to demonstrate your plan to the other students (using the projector).

After the seminar

Submit/email your plan to Anders (anders.froberg@liu.se), also include a link to you minor pull request.

Page responsible: Anders Fröberg
Last updated: 2018-05-18