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.

LibreFoodPantry is built to serve a wide range of communities and academic institutions. Examining each area helps me comprehend how this project was designed to function and all of the values linked with it. The Mission Statement, Values, which includes a Code of Conduct, Agile values and principles, and FOSSisms, for example. Licensing, Acknowledgements, the Coordinating Committee, and other topics are covered. For me, the Code of Conduct is one of the most significant topics in the reading because it discusses all of the relevant facts that might easily occur during online contact, such as harassment and discrimination. Because it governs how humans interact on the internet, computer ethics is vital.

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

After reading the items linked from the website, I think the FOSSisms is one of the parts that I find interesting. FOSSisms were created to ensure that developers who have never used open source before can be prepared for a culture shock. There are 16 maxims which are about the benefits that open source can bring to users, what circumstances will occur in the process of using open source, and actions or behaviors that a developer should do or behave in accordance with an open source community.

Moreover, I find FOSSisms useful because there are some maxims that I can apply to become more efficient and productive when working on an open source project, such as “It’s not what you know, it what you want to learn”, “give back”, and “show me the code”, etc. Those maxims remind me to always have the right mindset and appropriate behaviors when working in an open source community.

From the blog CS@Worcester – T's CSblog by tyahhhh 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.

After reading through the different sections for LibreFoodPantry, I wanted to focus on my post on the section about the organization of LFP because it gave a good outline of how it is divided among the people working on it. The LFP has a coordinating committee that is divided into a few shops, and each shop has at least one team dedicated to it. Professors and instructors that have their class involved are shop managers. The layout of LFP and how the committee and managers work reminded me of how kanban works because of the division of the work and visualization of LFP, with some elements of scrum such as a product owners and usage of user stories, and the shop managers could seem similar to scrum masters, since some of the managers here have classes that they may help and coach.

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

Before taking a look at the LibreFoodPantry user story map, I read through the linked article. I was able to understand the importance of a user story map when it comes to developing a project. I found the section,“Your software has a backbone and a skeleton – and your map shows it,” interesting because it actually makes sense when you look at the user story map. My initial impression on the food pantry project was that it was simple, but after looking at the story map, I realized that there are a lot of moving pieces that are all part of a bigger picture. I think that creating the story map is a good way of laying out all of the ideas of the clients and allows us to visualize/prioritize the features we need to work on.

Links: https://librefoodpantry.org/docs/user-story-map
https://www.jpattonassociates.com/the-new-backlog/

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

LibreFoodPantry is an open source software for food pantries with a growing community of developers, clients, and users. Upon perusing the website, I found their values to be particularly interesting, especially their value of FOSSisms. In my opinion, the belief system of FOSS (Free Open Source Software) contradicts the traditional teaching system that one receives throughout their academic career. For instance, a course at a university is typically led by a single professor, of whom the students receive all their direction from. In an Open Source community, the community tends to agree upon the direction in which the project goes. This can be a bit overwhelming for newcomers like myself to become accustomed to.

From the blog CS@Worcester – You have reached the upper bound by cloudtech360 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Another aspect of preparation for my Software Development Capstone project is to become familiar with Thea’s Pantry. Thea’s Pantry is a section of LibreFoodPantry that is being worked on by the staff and students of Worcester State University.

One important takeaway from this pantry’s data is that most, if not all, of the pantry’s technology is familiar to me; from OpenAPI and VUE to MongoDB and Docker, these technological tools have all been used by me in a previous class at Worcester State. I chose to write this down due to the fact that I find it nice that the flow of knowledge seems to be “continuous” as opposed to “discrete”. By this, I mean that aspects of one class are used in others, instead of being dropped entirely once the semester ends.

From the blog CS@Worcester – mpekim.code by Mike Morley (mpekim) and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.