When researching the “Thea’s Pantry” group on Gitlab I came across Conventional Commits. Conventional Commits is a system of writing commits that can be used for parsing by conventional keywords and formatting. This can be used to automatically generate CHANGELOGs and automate semantic versioning.

Conventional Commits is formatted as <type>[optional scope]: <description>. This creates a consistent format to write/read comments and can help you quickly find commits when searching for a specific commit. You also have the option to include a body and footers. These bodies and footers also have their own specific formatting to facilitate automated parsing. If convention is not followed commits can be squashed and reformatted upon merge by a project administrator.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Ryan Blog by rtrembley and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

While reading the documentation for Thea’s Pantry, I thought the User Stories section was really interesting. I think it is a valuable resource to have on hand while working on Thea’s Pantry since it gives a very clear description of how this software is intended to be used. This gives me a better idea of how the program should flow during use, and it especially helps me understand the difference between the responsibilities of a staff member and those of an administrator at the food pantry. I also thought it was interesting that only one guest was allowed into the pantry at a time; I did not know this previously.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Ciampa's Computer Science Blog by robiciampa and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

After looking over the gitlab page about Thea’s Pantry, I was intrigued as I never have gone to a food pantry before and had wondered how this software was going work with a repository of food. The User Stories page described clearly how a guest interacts with the software and how it has a place in gathering the information necessary and recording what is taken from it. It also listed categories about specific donations as well as which values can be chosen for how the items were donated. I honestly didn’t quite know what to expect but this listing made it clear to me how the software was going to be used. I at first thought it was going to be more centralized around inventory management but it’s a bit clearer to me that it also records who used and donated to the service.

From the blog CS@Worcester – A Boolean Not An Or by Julion DeVincentis and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The section that I choose to focus on is Thea’s Pantry Workflow. The workflow is an important part of this application because the workflow facilitates the flow of information, tasks, and events. A workflow is a blueprint for developers to follow on how to use git. Everyone on the team has access to the information that’s needed to complete the required actions. In Thea’s Pantry, the blueprint is easily readable and understandable on how to use git for this application. Any developer looking at the workflow or any new developers added to the team will be able to follow this process easily. The workflow also lets developers know if any push/commits that failed is explained as to why when using commitlint.

From the blog CS@Worcester – The Dive by gonzalezwsu22 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

After reading  the items from Thea’s pantry, user stories is the item that I find interesting because it provides me sufficient information that I need to know about the project. The user stories of this project has a total of five stories which are used to describe how the software will interact with the end users through access management, guest visiting, (food) inventory, and the monthly reporting. In other words, the user stories tell me that what inputs should be received and what output should be generated for each interaction between the software and the end users.

On the other hand, I find the user stories useful because it helps me better understand the project’s goals, and also understand the architectural parts more easily. Based on that, I can also figure out what I have to do in my capstone’s project.

From the blog CS@Worcester – T's CSblog by tyahhhh and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

What is Thea’s Pantry?

Thea’s Pantry is a food bank for Worcester State University community. It helps students, staff, and faculty who require food and other necessities. This service runs out of the Student Center on campus, offers a confidential service to people in need. There are a lot of positive things about Thea’s Pantry. The Thea’s Pantry client solution is described in full in the Documentation project, which includes User Stories, Architecture, Technology, Workflow, Release Process. Since I came from a retail background, architecture is a very interesting component for me because it helps layout the foundation of the business in general. For example, in this project, the architecture gives info about GuestInfoSystem, InventorySystem, ReportingSystem, IAMSystem (Third-party), EventSystem (Third-party). The Architecture allows the users to interact with the frontend and backend, where the guests will be able to interact with the frontend.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Site Title by proctech21 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I wanted to reread and write more about the architecture of Theas Pantry because it gave a detailed layout of multiple components, some of which are projects being worked on by some teams in the class. The main components shown are the standalone integration tests for GuestInfoSystem, InventorySystem, and ReportingSystem, and then a full integration test for Thea’s Pantry. I liked how it was divided into the standalone tests for the different components that will be worked on and used as a reference for the developers, and it is helpful to also show how they all come together in Thea’s Pantry with the added components such as IAMSystem and DirectorySystem for the full integration.

From the blog Jeffery Neal's Blog by jneal44 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I took a look at the user stories documentation to familiarize myself with the process of how everything works. The user stories are organized in a way that I can understand the step by step flow of the processes. I believe that this document will be pretty useful to refer to when working on the project. That being said, I noticed the pantry log entry form has been modified with all of the donation options crossed off. It would make sense to have separate forms for guests and donors. One thing I am curious about though is how they transfer the information from the google forms to the database, I will probably have to look into it some more.
Link: https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions/theas-pantry/documentation/-/blob/main/UserStories.md

From the blog CS@Worcester – Null Pointer by vrotimmy and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.