GSoC 2011 Melange Testing Project : Community Bonding Period

Its been two days since the GSoC 2011 results were declared and I am still unable to tell myself that I am now a Google Summer of Code student. :) . A vote of thanks and gratitude from the very depth of my heart to the Melange developers.

Python is awesome and I am now in love with it. My project is on testing and frankly speaking I have never studied about software testing before. The only idea about testing which I had was during solving exercise problems proposed in Google's Python Class videos. The coding problems had to be solved and then their output tested.

I explored about the Melange testing project more and more. I did not understand many of the terms like 'Test Driven Development', 'Continuous Integration' etc mentioned on the Melange's ideas page, but I googled and learnt about them, followed online tutorials and resources linked on the ideas page. I joined the melange-soc-dev mailing list and asked Sverre if I understood correctly what the project is aimed at. He said 'Sounds about right :) ' and then he pointed me to the 'Getting Started' guide. Since then there was no turning back and I devoted most of my time getting familiar with the framework and the testing modules. I explored the Melange's blog and read the posts of previous GSoC students. Leo and Savitha very well explained how they tried to understand the codebase. I did not know about the tools like tree and pylint.pyreverse before.

Then I decided to write a test for one of the modules in app.soc.logic and chose the 'validate' module. The test was simple but difficult to write if one does not know about the organisation of the modules and how the functions were used. I took me two days to get a feel of the code and get familiar with the directory structure. I finished the test, learnt and fixed the style issues and finally signed the CLA and the module was integrated into the codebase. That was my first contribution to Melange as a pre-GSoC exercise. This gave a boost to my confidence to contribute more to Melange.

I knew there were many students competing for the project and I decided to write my proposal differently so as to have an edge over other students. I decided to show a graph of the failures and errors that occurred everyday, the data which I collected everyday by running tests over a period of ten days. I also thought of showing a test code vs production code analysis. April 8 was the last date of submitting the proposals and I was busy with exams till April 5. Melange was the only organisation on which I had concentrated since the beginning and I knew I had to write a good proposal to get selected and dedicated all the 3 days in writing the proposal. The 'graph' and 'the code analysis' do not reveal anything groundbreaking but that was what my mind could think of then.

I regularly followed all the discussions on IRC, melange-soc-dev and gsoc lists. There were criticisms about the tinyMce editor and asked Sverre if the editor size can be increased because it seemed too cluttered. He asked me to do it. I read the tinyMce documentation and found many more helpful buttons can be added to the toolbar. Mario helped me in writing the configurations for the 'basic' and 'advanced' editor settings. I had never learnt jQuery before and I believed that I should not say " I don't know jQuery, so I can not do it". Instead I followed some tutorials and then it was easy. I also thought "Hey! you applied for the testing project and you are working on the editor."

It was a great experience working hard to bag the project. It is the first time I am contributing to an Open Source project in a major way and to see my name in the Author's List, Mario's Code Swarm video and the commit messages fills me with a feeling that I find difficult to describe.

Yesterday I attended my first conference call with the Melange developers and heard the sweet voice of Carol :P . I thought the meeting would be very formal but all of them were very jovial. Sadly, I could not introduce myself to other members as the mic was not working. Hope to fix it soon so that I can communicate during the meeting on Monday. I have exams starting Tuesday next week, so will discuss about the project plan with Leo after 15 May 2011. I will get a week of time before May 23 to read about GAE, Django and Software testing.

Melange community is really the 'awesome-st ' community and I wish to meet the developers and have fun with them at least once in my life. :) :)