UCOSP Blog Post – October 31st, 2011

I’m Yazan Medanat, a 4th year computer science student at the University of Toronto. I joined the Review Board team as a part of the UCOSP program. Review Board was listed amongst other interesting projects on the UCOSP website. I chose Review Board because I felt like it was a good fit for my set of skills, and I was interested in what the tool had to offer to its users.

Review Board is a tool that helps developer teams do peer reviews on code. It serves as a quality assurance tool for software. Developers can point out issues within code and suggest different approaches to solve the problems they face during the development process.

I first met the Review Board UCOSP group at the code sprint held at the University of Toronto in mid-September. It was a three-day event where all the UCOSP projects gather and get know their own respective teams. My group consisted of four members: Jacob, Dave, Waleed, and myself. We have three mentors, Christian, David, and Mike. The mentors introduced us to the project and discussed the details of the code-base. They explained to us how things work and helped us decide on a feature to develop. Each student was tasked to build a feature of their own choosing. We now have weekly online meetings to discuss our progress and resolve any issues we are facing with our tasks. We also chat about other non-Review Board issues. It’s always fun to talk to the team.

As a student, I’ve never dealt with software that affected an audience of this scale. One of the most appealing aspects of working on this project is knowing that everything we do will affect hundreds of projects and thousands of developers. Not to mention the large number of end-users who will benefit from the enhanced quality of the software reviewed using Review Board.

Besides developing my own feature within the project, I have found other ways to get involved with the project. I have joined the project’s mailing lists to hear what Review Board users have to say, to hear the issues they come across, and to learn how they interact with the tool. After working with Review Board for a while, I now recommend it to anyone working on building software as a team.

I take pride in saying I’m working on the Review Board project. I would like to thank UCOSP for organizing the program, and the mentors for all the effort they put into helping us students feel comfortable about the project and assist us with any issues we come across.

Yazan Medanat

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