CS-443 The Start

Hi everyone,

This semester we are back with some new exciting blogs that will cover the course CS-443, Software Quality Assurance & Test. We will learn about developing and implementing thorough test plans, applying diverse testing techniques efficiently, computing test coverage, conducting reviews, and assessing software processes for quality promotion. Be on the lookout for all the upcoming blogs.

From the blog CS@Worcester – CS: Start to Finish by mrjfatal and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

LibreFoodPantry

Website Review

The content from the LibreFoodPantry website was very informative and easy to follow. However, the content was information I have already received due to multiple in-class discussions regarding the project. Instead, I would like to take the time to review the website design and ease of use. One highlight of this website is the use of knowledge given, no matter the user background. This website caters to users who might come here wanting to know what this project is doing for the world, while others may come to learn more about the technical side of this project. The landing page acts as this buffer, giving a quick snapshot of this project as a whole, while providing additional pages to those who would like to know more. Also, this website has dark mode available and is easy to find!

Gitlab Review

One thing that surprised me was that each system had an experiment group that could be used. The purpose of this group is to allow users to create temporary projects that are used for educational use only and will not be pushed to production. I wrote about this as something I haven’t seen yet or heard much about. I find this to be a much more organized way to handle temporary files without the accidental chance of being pushed to production.

From the blog CS@Worcester – CS: Start to Finish by mrjfatal and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CS 443 Introduction blog

This semester I will be writing blogs as I learn more about software quality assurance and testing. Hopefully this will be a fun journey.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Live Laugh Code by Shamarah Ramirez and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Old Blog, New Year

Hi! I believe we’ve already met before, my name is Rai, and Im a student at Worcester State University. Im writing a new introductory post to welcome myself into the new year and to welcome myself into my new courses.

As for a little about me, I’m huge into video games and anything that flexes my creative muscle, which is why I’m going into a focus of Software Design and Development for my Junior year. I’ll be taking CS-443, Software Quality Assurance & Testing, with Professor Wurst, and as a part of that course, I’ll be writing for this blog ?

I hope to utilize this blog throughout my career, but for now I’ll simply be using it for this course and any other courses I take with Professor Wurst.

From the blog CS@Worcester – You're Telling Me A Shrimp Wrote This Code?! by tempurashrimple and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Introduction Post CS443

CS443 – Software Quality Assurance & Testing is a course I was very excited to take this semester. The topics that we will learn about will pair nicely with CS497 – Programming Language Design & Implementation as they both involve running test cases. Looking at the syllabus, I noticed that one of the tools we will utilize in the course is GitPod, having no experience with GitPod, I’m eager to experiment with its various features.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Computer Science Through a Junior by Winston Luu and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Re-Introduction: SP24

Hello my name is Andrew George and I am a student at Worcester State. Currently I am a Junior and nearly at the finish of my academic program, that being Computer Science. The road to reaching this point has been a long one, however through my struggling I’ve gained insight that I would have otherwise lacked. I speak about my academic progression here (in my original introduction post), so if you are interested in how I’ve reached this point you may read that attached blog post.

Within the three months of last semester I’ve learned so much more about Computer Science, and frankly it was both eye-opening and relieving. Up to this point my only experience with CompSci was the programming aspect of it. While yes programming is completely fundamental, I was craving something more from my studies. Fortunately this hunger was satiated by three of my classes last semester.

The first was a Computer Architecture class, which provided deep analyses on how hardware processes user input, and what that input looks like with machine language. Overall I found this to be the most fascinating of my courses thus far as the concepts we were learning helped click in place with information I’ve learned outside of school. I even found myself working with ‘virtual memory’ through increasing the maximum page size of my PC’s memory.

The next of these classes was a Database Design course. My experience with databases was little to none prior to entering this class. The closest experience I had was working with pseudo big data sets in my AP Computer Science class many years back in high school, which even that didn’t explain much. Needless to say everything I was learning in this course was completely new to me. I found that working with SQL was a nice change of pace, as I primarily only worked with Object Oriented Languages up until that point. My greatest accomplishment from that course was creating my final project around a java program which allowed integration from a database that I created. While yes the Java part of the project did need more time to finish, I was incredibly impressed with my progress and the product.

The last new course I took was a Software Management course, which I had little to no idea what to expect from it. Despite having little initial expectations for the course, I was able to take away many valuable lessons (and tools) from the course. I think taking this course was imperative for preparing me for working in the industry, as it familiarized me with both the tools and processes teams work with. Some content was familiar such as Agile, as I learned the basics of it at a previous college, but other topics such as repositories were completely new. Most topics covered in this course help serve as the glue to keep team-based projects together.

With all these classes considered I had a really effective previous semester in terms of learning new things. It taught me a very important lesson that was ‘maybe it’s important to step away from the compiler every now and then’. I could’ve used the time spent in these classes to focus on my direct coding skill, but instead I learned that will come with time. It’s very important to learn about Computer Science as a whole, rather than pin-holing my focus into ‘just coding’.

Until Next Time

– AG

From the blog CS@Worcester – Computer Science Progression by ageorge4756 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Exploring the LibreFoodPantry and Thea’s Pantry

As someone who has been learning about Computer Science for 7 years, I have always wanted to have a shot at being able to create an open-source project both for my career and creativity. When reading through the Values from the LibreFoodPantry Main Page, specifically about the “FOSSisms”, I had very closely related to the 11th FOSSism, the FOSSism that stated “It’s not what you know; it’s what you want to learn”. I had found this particular FOSSism inspiring as I have always wanted to create open-source software for solving particular tasks, even if I did not know anything about the software or the items that the software is trying to process. FOSSism 11 also helps to clarify the importance of FOSSism 3, where the goal is simply to “Give back” to the community, as I am hoping to use the things I learn from working with open-source software to help me with Software Engineering in the future.

After reading through the different items about the LibreFoodPantry, I delved into the documentation under the Thea’s Pantry repository to explore more about the open-source software being used. While I did read through the functionality of the software, some being more familiar than others, I was really intrigued with the User Stories under the Developer documentation. I read through the stories about how a user would think over designing a particular software. Reading through this part of the documentation, I had found that in order for a particular part of the system to function as intended, a user would have to make great use of a real-world problem in order to brainstorm new features to contribute to Thea’s Pantry. I am hoping that these user stories can help me use my current skills as a Computer Scientists to help make a great contribution to Thea’s Pantry.

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

Technology for Social Good: Software to Support Local Food Pantries

Hey everyone!

LibreFoodPantry’s mission is to expand a community of students and faculty who believe software can be used to help society. Specifically, they strive to support local food pantries with free and open source software to help serve their guests. This provides students with the perspective that computing can be used for social good. I found LibreFoodPantry’s goal of using technology for humanitarian aid to be an admirable and useful cause.

The user stories for Thea’s Pantry illustrate some of the key functions the software needs to provide. This includes guest check-in, tracking visits across calendar weeks, recording new inventory donations, looking up current inventory levels, and generating reports. An example is allowing staff to log in and enter guest’s university ID numbers to pull up their registration details. If it’s their first visit, they can fill out a new form which gets saved. For returning guests, staff can review and update details. The system also tracks how much food guests take across multiple visits within the same week. Other stories cover administrators verifying inventory levels and creating monthly reports for partners like the Worcester County Food Bank. I chose to highlight the user stories as they outline valuable features to aid Thea Pantry’s operations through customized software.

The LibreFoodPantry mission and Thea’s Pantry user stories provide insight into the principles and functionality behind developing customized software for food assistance organizations.

January 21, 2024

andicuni

CS@Worcester

CS-448,

Set-up Task #3

From the blog CS@Worcester – A Day in the Life as a CS Blogger by andicuni and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

LibreFoodPantry and Thea’s Pantry

Reading libres food pantry main page, one thing that was interesting was the page with the code of conduct more specifically enforcement guidelines.  What I thought was most interesting about that section was that in each bullet point there was listed a community impact and also a consequence. I thought that was interesting and informative because it gives clarity to the subject. I choose to write about it because it really grabbed my attention on how clear the topics where brought up, it really gave a feel on how serious it is to work in this project. One thing from the Theas Pantry I found interesting from the GitLab was the Thea’s pantry workflow. In this document it goes through the process of the developers and what they should be doing. It starts off with the branches and then tells developer to run the test before committing to their branches. It goes on with talking about commitlint and what to expect and what can possibly happen when committing. The reason why I decided to write about this part of the section was because it was very informative and it was good to refresh commits and the steps of how to with the changelog and version number.  

From the blog CS@Worcester – CS- Raquel Penha by raqpenha and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Libre Food Pantry & Thea’s Pantry

   Both the main GitLab page for Libre Food Pantry and its repository for Thea’s Pantry were very informative about the overall project and its desired direction. While Libre Food Pantry is a more broad project which contains Thea’s Pantry as a client the webpage was very informative not only on the standard for developing but also for the purpose of this free code.

   The main thing that caught my eye on librefoodpantry.org was the mission page as the page explains that this project is meant to aid humanitarian organizations (food pantries) and help modernize their inner workings. I chose to write about this as I was surprised that multiple other universities are also apart of the project and using it to teach computer science students more about teamwork and different types/categories of code.

   Thea’s Pantry on the other hand as it is a client solution and has more specified content including three systems with frontends and backends there is a lot more code to dive into. The thing I found most interesting in Thea’s Pantry was the Reporting System as this system is not something I would initially think of when developing software for use in a Food Pantry but it is definitely something very useful when it comes to tracking incoming and outgoing products. I chose to write about the reporting system as when reading about the different systems I found the reporting to be something more unique which is not necessarily seen in a large portion of food pantries as a reporting system is not included in the same way in the other projects of Libre Food pantry.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Dylan Brown Computer Science by dylanbrowncs and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.