A sister app for CATcher

[damithc]

Context: Due to the mission critical nature of how CATcher is used, we want to keep the features to a minimum, to reduce the risk of regressions and minimize the maintenance burden.

Problem: There are fewer opportunities for new CATcher devs to add features, and get the satisfaction of implementing something user-visible.

Suggestion: Have a sister app that is not mission critical but builds on the CATcher code base. Devs can add features to the sister app while gaining expertise that is relevant for maintaining CATcher at the same time.

One example (other ideas are welcome): A CATcher-like app (WATcher? :-D) for a small project team (e.g., a module project such as CS2103 or CS3203) to monitor their project in a more visual way e.g., charts etc. Target users can be students and possibly, instructors. Some example features:

• a visualization of PRs on a single timeline so that we can see how each team member contributed PRs over time
• show a record of project management activities done by each member e.g., creating issues/labels/milestones, merging PRs, PR reviews, etc.
• a visual timeline of commits by team members (this overlaps with RepoSense but might be OK to have)

What do you guys think? @seanlowjk @dingyuchen @kkangs0226 @chunweii @luminousleek @gycgabriel

[damithc]

An update: @gycgabriel will be looking into creating the first version of such an app during his summer internship. Others please pitch in with ideas and feedback/reviews ...

[dingyuchen]

Idea for sister app:
Jira-like issue tracker.
In addition to the management features Prof Damith has mentioned, I think an issue tracker application would complement CATcher, and the integration with GitHub means that helping build the sister app has translatable skills to maintaining CATcher.
It might also be a good avenue to experiment with UI/UX and add interesting features.
The main selling point would be for instructors to be able to view the issue progress of the teams under them in 1 view.

Example features:

• Create sprints to manage the development cycle
• Track the progress of each user story
  • Switch between different visualizations (kanban, list, gantt chart, etc)
  • Sync with github to track issue status
• View issues across repositories (instructor feature)

• a visualization of PRs on a single timeline so that we can see how each team member contributed PRs over time
• show a record of project management activities done by each member e.g., creating issues/labels/milestones, merging PRs, PR reviews, etc.

Possible issue is that it might require persistent storage. We can create a repo for the user and save app data in a text or sqlite file, and commit on changes?
Hopefully this idea can serve as inspiration :)

[damithc]

A prelim mock up (by @gycgabriel) for the issues dashboard view of WATcher:

Objective of this view: to show is doing what

Some thoughts:

• Perhaps we can also show issue number
• Remove creation date, to save space (as this view is about who is in charge of what, the date is not important)?
• Show more info on hover? e.g., date created, who created
• Also show PRs?
• Show status in some way open/closed/merged?
• Show milestone?

[luminousleek]

I wonder if something like this is possible:

Some explanation:

• Tabs to filter issue status (open / closed) - as time goes on and more issues are submitted, can be quite cluttered as issues that are opened and closed are mixed together. Useful to separate the two to easily see past work done and issues currently being worked on.
• Icon to indicate whether issue is open or closed - can just reuse the icons on Github. Easier to see / identify than having some label that says "open" or "closed"
• Reusing the space currently filled by issue creation date to show the PR linked to the issue, if any. For easy reference to the associated PR. Perhaps the PR number can also be a link to the PR in Github. Also, there's enough space to put the milestone of the issue to be displayed.

Some wishful feature requests:

• Some ability to filter / sort by milestone / issue type / priority / whether issue has linked PR
• A separate column to show unassigned issues

[damithc]

• A separate column to show unassigned issues

This is definitely a good idea, probably must-have.

Separately:

• Filtering/sorting is meant to be for the whole dashboard, not for each column.
• Filter by milestone can be useful too. Perhaps filter criterial can be drop down rather than tabs (reason: the space required doesn't depend on the number of options)?

[gycgabriel]

Suggesting this filter design:

Taking inspiration from Youtube search, the filters section can be dropped down on click.

• Filter by Labels can show the top frequent labels, but must have a smaller search bar to search through all possible labels
• The filters will apply across all columns

[damithc]

Suggesting this filter design:

Taking inspiration from Youtube search, the filters section can be dropped down on click.

• Filter by Labels can show the top frequent labels, but must have a smaller search bar to search through all possible labels
• The filters will apply across all columns

Looks good. To save vertical space, make them drop-downs? Similar to how GitHub issue tracker does it

[damithc]

For an activity dashboard (objective: to show how active a person was during the project period), one idea is to have something like this:

The the three cells in each row show activities for a week, on

• issues (create, close, comment, assign, ...),
• PRs (create, merge, comment),
• commits

Darker colors mean more active, inspired by GitHub's own activity visualization given below: