The Software Development Committee provides input and guidance on the development of the BitCurator software.

This committee is currently on hiatus as the Executive Council evaluates the best way to support the maintenance and sustainability of the software environment.

Why you should join

Are you interested in learning more about open-source digital forensics software for institutions managing born-digital materials? Do you want to participate in community-based open-source software development, but are not sure where to begin? The Software Development Committee might be just the place! Join to take part in maintaining and driving the future development of BitCurator tools.

What you might need to know

• Familiarity with the BitCurator Environment and related BCC developed tools
• Experience (or interest to learn about) using GitHub, Jira, software development workflows, and managing repositories
• Experience (or interest in) testing new features, releases, and bug fixes
• Familiarity with one or more programming languages and/or technologies currently used in BCC tools would be ideal
• Development and/or coding experience is not required
• Estimate time commitment: 3 hours/month

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with developers (both those associated with BCC as well as external contributors) to decide which projects to maintain and which tools in the current BC Environment will move forward with the next release.
• Review current Jira tickets and GitHub issues to create a plan to address them through a development roadmap or other means.
• Appoint a SDC member liaison to the Documentation and Training Committee
  • This person joins their monthly meetings, updates QuickStart Guides each time a new release is made, and decides when documentation for legacy tools should be deprecated.
• Appoint a SDC member liaison to the Membership Committee
  • This person joins their monthly meetings and helps to recruit developers and onboard them to the SDC.

Proposed Projects

The first few meetings of the Software Development Committee will establish their working plan. What follows is a list of proposed projects for that action plan.

• Track community engagement (GitHub downloads/forks) with the environment. This might include statistics of each tool’s use in terms of end users and use of software components (if they are being forked/extended within other projects).
• Create onboarding documentation for interested developers (via GitHub)
• Brainstorm and develop a method for recognizing contributors (through a membership tier, forward-facing community communications, etc.)
• Identify projects/scripts for the Python Study Group to work on.
• Manage bug reports and pull requests for existing BCC projects
• Work with community members and developers to identify and prioritize feature requests
• Manage the release schedule, liaise with the community of developers (help them through our development process).
  • Review previously-developed Software Release Plan and decide if/how to implement it, or what needs to be updated
• Document current development processes and practices towards sustainable (distributed) ongoing development
• Organize outreach and events that promote diversity and inclusion in the development of BCC projects

Resources

• github.com/BitCurator
  • Organized by project within repo
  • Repo contains some portal pages for software projects with mini wiki pages for past projects. Needed somewhere to dump the technical documentation that did not fit in the wiki, ensure that this historical information could be retained. (Access, NLP)
• github.com/BitCurator/bitcurator-distro
  • Main portal page for environment release. Contains mini wiki for current release, release notes, and technical documentation.
• Jira
  • Jira was reviewed manually and some things were taken on. This is another place where some development tasks may live.
• Development – BitCurator Environment Wiki
  • Release Process and Schedule, Roadmap, and Filing an Issue instructions from the BitCurator Environment documentation wiki