Why not discuss our class project on my blog? Blogging is supposed to reflect changes in learning experiences, so maybe I will occasionally write about how my team is progressing with the class project.
This semester we work in teams of three to download an open source project and run tests on it. My team (Team International) consists of me and classmates Tony Tang and Gui Costa. The three of us did not know each other when the semester started - I think Gui and Tony maybe had classes together before, though.
At first, we chose the open source mWater project - this is an app that you can download on Android and it tells you what the quality of the water nearby is like - this is particularly useful for third world country users. Documentation for the mWater app (whose repo can be found on GitHub) is not helpful and there is not a lot of it. The GitHub repo has some information in it, but not much in the way of instructions for downloading, compiling, and running the code. Most of all, there are a lot of dependencies for the source code and it was impossible to figure out what was going on (especially since I had never used GitHub, the Terminal, the Linux Ubuntu OS or Android Studio) before this project started. After meeting with our professor, Dr. Bowring, we decided to change our project to the much better documented Celestia project.
Celestia is a space simulation application that has been around for years. The last update was in 2011 by the original engineers, but we were able to find a recent version of the software in a GitHub account that was trying to bring the project back to life. This revival of the Celestia application is extremely well explained and, although it took us until 3:30am one Monday night, we successfully cloned the repo, installed dependencies, compiled, and ran the application (to much exhausted cheering).
Today, we worked on writing out very plain instructions that anyone can follow as long as they have a fresh Virtual Box running a 64-bit Ubuntu OS. We were tired of navigating around browsers trying to find the installation commands for everything - so we just consolidated it.
Here is a link to our repository - it is a work in progress! Overall, our team is moving along nicely - next comes the testing and becoming experts in C++ in order to even understand the testing. More on that later!