Open source sprints at PyCon Balkan in Belgrade

Next month our team will be at PyCon Balkan, Oct 3-5 in Belgrade. Together with presentation and a workshop we are going to host open source sprints! These will be an informal gathering where participants will be able to learn more about how open source works and go through their first contributions. This is ideal for students and less experienced people but we welcome everyone. There will be tasks ranging from easy to very hard!

Who: 4 mentors from Kiwi TCMS and you!

What: full day of peer programming and contributing to Kiwi TCMS

Where: room will be announced on the days of the conference, follow @KiwiTCMS for more info

Why: up your tech skills, build your GitHub profile and have fun together

Translate Kiwi TCMS

Difficulty: easy

We have enabled Serbian language in our translation system. To get started checkout our translation contribution page. Once strings are translated kiwitcms-bot will automatically open a pull request with the new text.

Find unused CSS classes

Difficulty: easy

This should be relatively easy. For each class/selector defined in our CSS files search (grep) if any of the HTML templates use it. If it is not in use then remove it.

Find unused JavaScript code

Difficulty: easy

Similar to the above. We're not 100% certain but there could be legacy JavaScript functions which are no longer in use. Find them and remove them! At the very least you have confirmed that all functions are in use!

CodeClimate Minor severity issues

Difficulty: easy to moderate

Check-out the list of Minor severity issues. There are many of them:

• CSS lint issues (we suggest you start with this one)
• functions longer than 25 lines of code
• functions with bigger cognitive and cyclomatic complexity
• modules longer than 250 LOC

Try fixing a few to see how it goes and continue if you feel confident. Not everything may be an issue so if you have any questions ask someone from our team.

CodeClimate Major severity issues

Difficulty: moderate to hard

Check-out the list of Major severity issues. There are around 150 of them:

• identical and similar code blocks
• big modules
• big functions

Most of these require some sort of refactoring, either splitting snippets of code into smaller pieces (functions or sub-modules) or using one function in several places instead of 2 very similar but different functions, etc. Ask our team members about which approach they prefer for fixing these issues to minimize the effort spent here.

CodeClimate Critical severity issues

Difficulty: hard

Check-out the list of Critical severity issues. All of these are functions with high cognitive complexity and the recommended way to deal with them is refactoring into class based views.

Improve pylint health

Difficulty: easy

Execute pylint against the latest sources and start fixing the issues. Looking at pylint logs the following items are relatively easy to work on:

• Everything in module tcms.urls
• Everything in module tcms.telemetry.api
• Everything in module tcms.testruns.tests.test_views
• Everything in module tcms.xmlrpc.forms
• Everything in module tcms.testcases.tests.test_models
• Everything in module tcms.core.forms.fields
• Everything in module tcms.settings.common
• Everything in module tcms.settings.test
• All module-in-directory-without-init errors reported for module tcms.tests.__init__

Note: fixme, missing-permission-required and avoid-auto-field errors are usually harder to resolve and will require more work/refactoring. If you feel confident go ahead and fix them, if not skip to the next error message.

We also use a custom pylint checker which reports function based views. If you are looking for something harder to work on, then give it a try (see 3rd pylint line in Makefile) and refactor some of the existing view functions into class based views.

Fix 3rd party security issues discovered by Bandit

Difficulty: moderate to hard

Bandit is a static analysis tool similar to pylint. It focuses on discovering issues which may lead to security vulnerabilities. We have resolved all such issues in our own source code but we also execute Bandit against the entire Python dependency stack. There it finds thousands of issues, so much so that the reporter crashes.

In CI there are around 130 issues reported. The best course of action here is to execute Bandit locally against the offending library and then figure out what to do:

• report an issue upstream
• send a pull request upstream
• if these are test files maybe exclude them from the package (e.g. don't ship them for production)

Note: inside Travis CI we have all runtime and testing dependencies which is more than what we have inside the official Docker image for Kiwi TCMS.

Work on reported issues

The following issues look suitable for a sprint and don't require lots of background knowledge. You can also find them using the PyConBalkan label on GitHub:

• #212 - moderate - Convert jQ to $ - this is an easy search & rename but will require more extensive manual testing
• #431 - moderate to hard - Remove JavaScript fireEvent() - 17 matches in static/js/. Must be replaced with direct function calls
• #652 - easy - Removal of labels from form fields - all labels must be included in the HTML template and marked for translation
• #681, #682 - moderate - Move API modules & their tests from xmlrpc/api/<app>.py to <app>/api.py. These have good test coverage so you have to make sure you don't break anything
• #971 - moderate - manage.py command for changing Site URL - will help with automatic provisioning, e.g. Ansible. For howto see Django docs
• #1021 - moderate - Update TestCase page UI to allow adding TestPlans to cases - use TestPlan.add_case() API method and refresh the widget. See how Tags and Components cards work in the same page
• #1070 - moderate - manage.py command for checking email settings - will help with troubleshooting misconfigured email. Must raise exceptions if something fails. For howto see Django docs
• #733, #736, #738, #883, #1089 - hard to very hard - New checkers for pylint - Kiwi TCMS uses customized pylint checkers to discover various conditions. We need a few more of them and/or update of the existing ones

We hope to see you in Belgrade. Until then: Happy testing!