Looking at the workflow page for the Thea’s Pantry documentation, the first thing I noticed was “conventional commits.” I’d seen them in the commit logs of the projects but wasn’t aware of the name of this format or the motivation behind it.

There’s also the system of having one branch per feature being worked on. In my college courses, none of the projects I’ve worked on have really been large enough to have a need for branches, unless the point of the project was learning about branches. The last time I’ve actually had to use branches was back in high school for my vocational classes (I’m pretty lazy so my personal git projects tend to not have branches) and so hopefully my git skills come back to me.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tom's Blog by Thomas Clifford and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Thea’s Pantry is a custom pantry management system for Worcester State University. For developers to correctly design an application to meet the needs of the end-user, user stories are created. These stories are a generalized overview of the application workflow from the perspective of a type of user. Staff and Administrator are the two identity roles where Administrator has all permissions including those of the Staff role. The staff role is responsible for handling interactions with guests visiting the pantry and updating inventory when donations come in. Administrators are responsible for monitoring the inventory levels and generating monthly reports for the Worcester County Food Bank. I chose to examine the user stories of the Theas Pantry project because I am interested in how the application is operated by its users and the features it provides.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Jared's Development Blog by Jared Moore and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

In my previous post I discussed Libre Food Pantry, a collaborative effort between multiple colleges in New England to create software to help local food pantries better serve their communities. This time I will briefly discuss Worcester State’s contribution in the form of Theas Food Pantry which is used right here on campus.

Theas Food Pantry is a software solution to the food pantry of the same name on campus created by Computer Science Majors. This is made up of many industry standard frameworks such as REST API calls, a JavaScript based front end written with the Vue framework, and Docker for containerization. It is interesting to see how, like many websites and databases this is made using tools that are commonplace in the industry. Many of these tools are open source and yet are still a part of the core workflow in many major software development firms.

From the blog CS@Worcester – George Chyoghly CS-343 by gchyoghly and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

While LibreFoodPantry, which I introduced from my last blog, serves the local Worcester as a whole, another similar project, Thea’s Pantry, is developed exclusively for the Worcester State University community. The user story in this project is written linearly instead of a map compared to LibreFoodPantry, it’s less specific but illustrating the general purpose. However, LibreFoodPantry didn’t indicate the architecture and technology used in the project, Thea’s Pantry instead demonstrated everything beforehand giving the readers a technical perspective about how this project is going to be implemented. Since the big task is broken up into smaller pieces, different teams of developers can work at the same time and each new completed project will become a feature of the final product. Furthermore, by using GitLab CI pipeline, it will be continuously delivered with a new semantic versioning. Overall, this project idea is to benefit both students and pantries at the same time by educating students to develop something practical for the people.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Vien's Blog by Vien Hua and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

• User Stories

I know the costumer ultimately is the organizer using the device, but I could not stop thinking of the people on the other side, who are they, a community member in need, a homeless person, a student in need. This made me think about privacy and sensible ways of presenting quantity constraints in a respectable way. I don’t think a future in UI/UX is for me, but I believe the user should be expanded.

• Architecture and Technology

What I think is most helpful is the architecture and technology. Mostly architecture, I remember how easy it is to get lost on systems that have many parts with different relations. The UML diagrams are important not only to get it right in the first place but check whether you did get it right or not. I think dependencies are hard to describe concurrently having their layout ahead of work makes everyone’s lives a lot easier.    

From the blog CS@Worcester – technology blog by jeffersonbourguignoncoutinho and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.