How to make the Dumux day more interesting
Challenges a developer may face:
- Some issues/merge requests are not descriptive enough. That could demotivate the developer to work on them.
- The discussion about some issues becomes too technical during the Dumux day meeting. That can be frightening to others with different area of expertise.
- Fear of failure deters people from contributing to unfamiliar issues.
- No solid/detailed description of some parts of the code.
- Strict guidelines
The collected ideas:
- The issues/merge requests should give more details and describe the issue in a proper way.
- When the discussion becomes so technical that concerns only a part of the group during the Dumux day main meetings, it should be interrupted and continued only by the interested people in a separate meeting.
- Dumux day is about learning things other than your own area. To realize that goal as well as to help those who their fear of failure prevent them to contribute, we can assign a task not to a single person but to a small group of people (2 or 3 persons). The group should consist of more experienced and less experienced members.
- After clarifying what each part of the code aims to do, we can add a description for developers to the handbook and at least cover the classes which are used in the main file.
- Another idea is to record or write down the tutorials given by experienced members of the group and keep them for the new members joining us in future.
- Every body can develop and implement their code in a separate module. However, if they want to integrate the module in the Dumux, they must follow the guidelines. By doing so, we prevent inconsistency and bugs in the future. We recommend to use the guidelines even in your private module. In addition, following the guidelines in the code could be seen as a learning process which improves the programming skills.
Edited by Ned Coltman