On the way to the Evaluation Report

The first draft of Hackystat Classroom evaluation in fall 2008 is finished. Philip had proof-read once and give me feedback. I am now editing according to the feedback and finishing the future direction part.

This week I will start doing the analysis of the logging data collected during the evaluation period last semester. It will be interesting to compare it with the answers given by the students. This analysis and result of comparison will be included in the tech-report.

Meanwhile, there are still lots of learning for Latex to me. I am still quite new to Latex and not so familiar with it yet. One of my class's assignments are required to be written in Latex as well. There really a good time for me to practice it.

Currently, there is no planning for programming work. Project browser seems in quite a good shape now. Maybe after finishing the future direction part, I will do more improvement accordingly.

Plan for this semester

Now it is the beginning of the second week of this semester. In this semester I continue to work in Philip's lab and write my thesis for Master plan A. Beside the ICS700 and ICS690(seminar), I took another two graduate courses: ICS621 Analysis of Algorithms & ICS606 Intelligence Autonomous Agents. Both of these course seem to be a busy class. The former one requires lots of paper writing, which may be good for me while I am writing my thesis. The later one will include quite amount of LISP programming, which I am not so familiar with. That seems to be a very busy semester.

Plan for RA, research and thesis

The first priority will be finishing the tech-report of the classroom evaluation of Hackystat in Fall 2008. Over a half of it is done. It should be finished in a few days.

The second priority, which will soon become the first, is writing the thesis about Software ICU. There are several tasks in it upon finishing the tech-report:

1. Process the usage data collected in the last semester;
2. Literature review on related work (software metrics, single and multiple software project management, software project portfolio, etc);
3. Review the former study of Hackystat such as Telemetry.

Other things related to CSDL research:

• Philip has begun a new project called Devcathlon, which is a game about software development. It will be an interesting project to work on;
• I also want to make some improvement to Hackystat system, it includes:

• 1. Enhance performance, java-based modularity system like Equinox and OSGi.
  2. Enhance the loading process panel. Current implementation is to verbose. I want to make it more concise and/or use other approach such as loading bar.
  3. Make improvement to let portfolio page better suit to the 9-LCD workspace. One idea will be make the input panel hiddable and introduce auto-refresh feature, but it will better with the performance enhancement.