University Work - Updated

Here is a short update with my current work at the University of Calgary Software Engineering Department:

My just finished sub-project that will contribute to the main tool mentioned in an earlier post, is to make a tool that will allow a user to enter in a revision number, to calculate analytical data.  The tool first uses the revision number to find out what changed during the commit that corresponds to the revision number.  It then scans the SVN repository and figures out what branches have received the changes from that commit, and when.  It also determines which files from the commit were merged and which weren't, this is to handle cases where there is a partial merge, and to calculate the percentage of the commit that was merged.

Once this data has been determined, it is printed out to the screen in an easy to interpret, human readable form.  At a later date this tool will be expanded upon to output data in a way that will allow it be utilized int a GUI.  The GUI will be used to visualize the timeline for changes in a commit being integrated into other branches in the repository, among many other things.

Adam Kromm

University Work... Conflict resolution

On Wednesday I started my new temporary full time job as a research assistant at the University of Calgary. I will be working with Professor Jonathan Sillito and his masters student Shaun Phillips, to create a tool that will allow the visualization and analysis of a SVN repository tree. Better said I will be creating a tool that will allow a company with multiple teams and multiple development stages visualize them, most likely with a graph, and view potential merge conflicts before the actual merging needs to happen. This will allow companies and developers to locate and recognize potential conflicts and problems before they happen and will therefore allow developers be more aware of other developers and thus allow them to collaborate more intelligently and efficiently.

Current progress is pretty good. I'm going to split the tool into two parts: the repository analyser and the visualiser. This will allow the analyser to run in the background generating the files for the visualizer, then the teams can load up the visualiser and load the most recent data generated and display it. This will allow the visualization to be smooth so that there is no time wasted waiting for the repository to be analysed while in a meeting.

The tools that I have been using so far are Java and SVNKit.

Because I have been working at the University it has limited the time that I have to work on personal projects like DirectX. I still have managed to find some time to continue working on learning DirectX 10 and HLSL 4.0, it's just not as fast as I had hoped.