Last Wednesday night I finished my comparisons between GitLab Gold and GitHub Free. I’m happy that I managed to get through all of the features before the LibreFoodPantry retreat the following day. I found that most of the features left for GitLab Gold did not have comparable versions in GitHub. This is more of what I was originally expecting and so the remainder of the table has a lot of features marked GitLab Gold exclusives. There was also a trend with the GitLab features that most of them would relate to one overall feature such as having Epics so since GitHub doesn’t have a native Epics feature it wouldn’t have any advanced features related to managing and tracking Epics like GitLab does. I also found that some of these features were harder to compare between platforms since most of them were more advanced, enterprise grade features than the earlier ones. This is again also due to how well the documentation for both platforms explains the features and how to use them.
Thursday was the beginning of the LibreFoodPantry Retreat. We started off by going to lunch and having casual conversations before the meetings began. I enjoyed this as I got to know everyone a little bit before getting down to business. Once we got back from lunch, all of the members who taught a course last semester developing software for LibreFoodPantry had a retrospective detailing the good and the bad and developing ideas and solutions to the issues. I found this process interesting to observe, especially after learning about software management processes this spring and now I got to see it in action with a real project. My advisor and I briefly described our summer research project and how it relates to what was currently happening with LibreFoodPantry. Through the first day I began to learn about issues that the group was encountering and areas where I can focus my research. Some items I will need to look for is assigning issues to multiple people or groups.
Friday continued with the second day of the LibreFoodPantry Retreat. I came in after lunch and immediately saw a whole whiteboard along one wall covered in sticky notes with labels. I soon found out that this was all of the user story mapping that was worked on while I wasn’t there. Dr. Jackson went through the whole story mapping briefly with me, explaining the user groups and the features and how they all fit together. It was eventually decided that this story map should be stored in the LibreFoodPantry organization/group on whichever platform we end up using and I should try to create a small version of this board on each platform. We then moved on to discussing infrastructure and workflow. Additional things I will be looking at now will be setting up continuous integration in GitLab and see how this works. I will also be fixing my platform features table so that features have consistent naming with their respective platform and that they are directly comparable across rows. Overall, I really enjoyed going to the LibreFoodPantry Retreat and seeing the processes and discussions involved in creating an open source software project.
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