University of Helsinki OpenReq Hackathon

March 15, 2019

University of Helsinki OpenReq Hackathon

The Empirical Software Engineering research group hackathon with Qt about requirements intelligence

Welcome to a hackathon on Friday 15th of March 2019! Research group Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) at University of Helsinki is holding a one-day hackathon related to EU project OpenReq. The hackathon takes place in the newly renovated space on the second floor of Kumpula Campus Library (Gustaf Hällströmin katu 2, Helsinki). Project partner Qt will also be present. Students will naturally gain study credits for participation.

Agenda

  • 8:30 breakfast is served, University of Helsinki, second floor of Kumpula Campus Library (Gustaf Hällströmin katu 2, Helsinki)
  • 9:00 official program starts, University of Helsinki, second floor of Kumpula Campus Library (Gustaf Hällströmin katu 2, Helsinki)
  • 18:00 official program ends
  • 18:00 afterparty and going through the solutions (location to be announced later at the event)

The official program starts at 9:00. Breakfast is served from 8:30 onwards. Refreshments and snacks are available during the event. When the library closes at 18:00, we will move to after-party location where we will go through the solutions. There is a light dinner/snacks and beverages available at the after party as well as sauna (to be confirmed).

The hackathon focuses on requirements. Today’s large distributed open source projects or large systems engineering projects can contain a huge number of requirements items. For example, the Qt Company uses Jira issue tracker for bugs and requirements: There is about 100.000 issues in Jira from the past decade, and about 25.000 of them have been modified within two years. There are anomalies in this requirements data and the data is too large to manage or understand by hand. Therefore, there is a need for intelligence to manage, analyse, visualise etc, the entire body of requirements, their interdependencies as well as individual requirements, and their qualities and properties. It is not only about understanding what should be done, but to make sense of existing requirements.

The hackathon projects can be from the field of requirement management or especially within the OpenReq project focusing broadly on three different topics:

  • Further development or adaptation micro services, which have already been developed in OpenReq.
  • Adapting data from other source for OpenReq micro services utilising the OpenReq ontology.
  • Intelligence for requirements data, in particularly Qt’s Jira data consisting of around 100k issues in Jira.

Examples of possible topics (To be refined, see updates!)

Naturally you can invent your own topic, but the following are some example topics.

  • Import and/or export adaptors between OpenReq services and other systems such as github issue tracker or Doors.
  • A plugin that uses OpenReq services, such as a plugin to Eclipse.
  • User experience improvement, such as porting to mobile devices.
  • Statistics or visualisations for data, especially Qt Jira issues.
  • Application of OpenReq data to existing AI, ML etc. engines in order to carry out analyses etc. For example, adapter to detect dependencies using TUGraz service (https://github.com/OpenReqEU/tug-dependency-detection) or other existing libraries  (e.g. Weka https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/).
  • Detect dependencies from text. For example, https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QBS-881 has explicit link to QBS-991. However, QBS-881 is also duplicated by QBS-912, which is noted in the comments. This kinds of comments can be hard to notice and should be extracted from text (and written as proper issue links). It is possible to develop a new service or adapt UPC’s cross reference detector  https://github.com/OpenReqEU/cross-reference-detection.
  • A system to keep track of and compare different versioning schema between projects in order to keep track when versions will be released. That is, if even if different versions can be interpret within a project, it is hard to know between projects the order of releases.

The participants are given two credits at University of Helsinki by after successfully participating in the hackathon and completing the post-hackathon survey. Moreover, the hackathon can provide ideas for BSc and MSc thesis or seminar topics and other research including familiarisation to the research done in the ESE group. The good prototypes can also be concretely developed further and used as a part of studies, such as a part of BSc or MSc thesis or as a seminar, or even as a summer job in ESE research group. These possibilities will be agreed separately.

You can get to know the building blocks of OpenReq infra from the links below. Please take a look beforehand.

You may take part either alone, in a pair or with a group. Everyone should bring their own laptop. You can choose development tools by yourself. We recommend to use github and plan to use Slack for communication during the hackathon.

There’s a place for 25 participants. The sign-up is now open at https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/96442/lomake.html. Please register before 12 13.3.2019.

Any questions? Contact mikko.raatikainen@helsinki.fi