[kplato] University collaboration : looking for mentors

[Kevin Ottens]

Hello dear KPlato crew,

== Executive summary ==
We're about to have 2 groups of 10 students from my university working during 
several months on KDE related projects. KPlato is one of the selected 
projects, so we need a mentor to give them advices during this project, and 
track their progresses.

== Detailed version ==
First of all, I'll provide some background information. A few years ago I was 
a student in the Paul Sabatier University (Toulouse, France), the course I 
followed is called "Institut Universitaire Professionalisé en Ingénierie des 
Systèmes Informatiques" (IUP ISI) [ISI]. Now I'm preparing a PhD in this same 
university, and I'm teaching to IUP ISI students. IUP ISI is targetting 
computer engineering with a strong interest in project management.

One of the originality of this course is that students have a group project at 
the end of each year, it's particularly interesting for the third and fourth 
year students, hence why I'll give some more details on this.

The fourth year students start their group project around the middle/end of 
october. Each group has generally four or five students. They work on their 
project during two or three months : project planning, architecture, coding, 
testing. They generally have a prototype (semi-)working after this first 
phase.

Then, each group get four or five more third year students joining until the 
end of the project (deadline is still two or three months away when it 
happens). Which means that each group has now around ten students working.

Traditionally the proposed projects where very focused on ad hoc solutions for 
project and process management. Several tools for creating and managing 
processes were developed from scratch. Each year new tools were built on top 
of previous year products. For next year, they're planning to get ride of the 
past and build ad hoc tools around the Eclipse Process Framework [EPF].

But, I also took this opportunity to push the idea to really collaborate with 
a free software project, hence why I'm writing this email: I think KDE should 
be this project. I've been allowed to organize such a collaboration. For this 
first test we won't have many projects, but KPlato is something the professor 
staff is interested in and which has been selected for this year.

I think we should allocate at least one mentor for KPlato. Mentors will
be supposed to issue a short evaluation of the students work each two or 
three weeks. A rough estimate about the design quality, use of tests, code 
quality, use of our tools (mailing lists, subversion, etc.) and interaction 
with the community will be asked. Of course, students will expect some
guidance and advices. I don't expect much more will be required.

Currently I proposed this initial goal lists for a KPlato group:
 - Generally improve the GUI, I guess there's some to do
 - PERT view
 - Supporting project execution (maybe integrating with karm)

Probably more could be done in the given timeframe (MS Project import/export 
for example), the list is not final yet and can evolve during the project. I 
provided something short and a bit vague on purpose, this way students have 
some freedom on what they'll work on, it'll have to be negociated with their 
professors and mentors though.

So, if you feel like the right person to mentor such a student group, please 
step up. You might end up with new KPlato regular contributors in the end.

Regards.

[ISI] http://www.iup-ups.ups-tlse.fr/isi/ (sorry french only)
[EPF] http://www.eclipse.org/epf/
-- 
Kévin 'ervin' Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net
"Ni le maître sans disciple, Ni le disciple sans maître,
Ne font reculer l'ignorance."