MSU CSE Capstone update 1/16

Today is the beginning of the second week of the project. On Friday, Blair and I met with the students and went over project specifications and more details of contributing to Mozilla. This is a relatively short update since the course just started and the team is still finding their way around the Mozilla codebase.

The team is comprised of four senior Computer Science students (pictured from left to right):

• Zuhao (Joe) Chen
• Owen Carpenter
• Devan Sayles
• Jon Rietveld

The team got builds up and running on Windows and Mac OS X and are close to getting their first bug fixed. I wrote up a short tutorial to get the students introduced to the preferences code in Firefox and they’ve gone through the tutorial and made their first sample preferences page. They are also busy at work putting together a project plan that Blair and I will review and provide feedback on. The students were also introduced to Zhenshuo Fang from the Firefox UX team, who is leading the user experience of the feature.

I have filed a tracking bug for the project and will file dependent bugs once we have fleshed out the smaller chunks.