CS3281 Projects and Mentors

CATCher

Current focus:

• Build up the sister app: WATcher
• Support the 'Bug pruning' phase in CATcher
• Improve testing.
• Improve dev docs.
• Improve the user guide.
• [Hard] Find a way to make the tester's repo private during the PE (to prevent others copying bugs).
• [Less important] Add support for the tutor moderation phase.

Suggested user-experiments:

• (a)
  Use WATcher to visualize activities in different projects that similar to our target user i.e., small team projects
• (b)
  Set up a dummy PE session for CATcher

MarkBind

Current focus:

• Make the following features best-in-class:
  • Tables (e.g., filter rows based on keyword)
  • Code blocks
  • Diagrams
  • Icons
  • Lists (e.g., customizing bullet points)
• Improve built-in search (e.g., include full-text search) so that we don't have to rely on external services.
• Solve these hard problems:
  • Add support for generating multiple versions of a website e.g., documentation for different product versions.
  • Find a way to add pop-over explanations for statements in a code block.
  • Find a way to support PR previews (the way Netlify does it).
• Internal:
  • Improve the robustness of the architecture.
  • Improve developer documentation.

Suggested user-experiments:

• (a)
  Create and deploy a MarkBind website from scratch, for any use case you see fit (e.g., personal portfolio page)
• (b)
  Replicate the same using another static site generator (here is a long list). Compare results.
• (c)
  Make use of MarkBind's strong/unique features in the above two sites
• (d)
  Set up CS2103/T website locally and play around with it, to get the experience of a fairly large/complex MarkBind site

RepoSense

Current focus:

• Improve performance of the report for large data sets e.g., this report.
• Reduce memory use when viewing reports
• Ensure local report generation works for private repositories.
• Make it easy for someone to set up a 'moving window' report (e.g., show last 3 months) or a repo or multiple repos in an organization e.g., for a project manager/maintainer to keep an overview of the code changes to related repos.
  Idea: Provide a ready-made repo they can fork and documentation on how to set it up with minimal effort required. Even better if there is a web page they can go to enter some data, click some buttons, which would set up the report automatically.
• Hard problems:
  • distinguish between and code. A recent FYP student made some progress on this aspect.

Suggested user-experiments:

• (a)
  Set up a code dashboard to showcase your own project work
• (b)
  Deploy it, and set it to auto-update daily
• (c)
  Add fairly-detailed blurbs to each project in that dashboard

TEAMMATES

Current focus:

• A list of project ideas is given in the TEAMMATES wiki. The project ideas that are ear-marked for CS3281 will be given to you during the code-sprint).

Suggested user-experiments:

• (a)
  Set up a TEAMMATES course (in the production server) and add your project-mates as students
• (b)
  Set up feedback sessions in that course, targeting diverse use cases and different question types e.g.,

  • for grading a team project
  • for students to give feedback for presentations done by other classmates
  • for instructors to collect feedback for the course
• (c)
  Get submit responses to dummy sessions set up by other team members (to experience the student POV)
• (d)
  View the results of the sessions you set up

SE-EDU

Current focus:

• Limited to maintaining and fine-tuning AB3 and Duke. AB1, AB2, AB4 are to be archived.
• Keep the code base updated to match the new versions of the tool stack.
• Tweak to make the students' life easier e.g., simplify where possible.
• Migrate Duke, AB3 to JavaFX 16?

[1] Those marked as industry are not official mentors. They are past developers who are still willing to provide moral support and help out in an advisory role when their input is required.