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Commit bea627c83c40fb003fc2d87ddb19474ad8c66bce

Authored by Paulo Meireles
1 parent a10e5956
Exists in master and in 3 other branches oss_2018, oss_2018_siqueira, rework_case_study

Section on the new SPB Portal: mergin with architecture description

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OSS-2017/02-platform.tex
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1   -\section{Platform for collaborative software development}
2   -
3   -%TODO: Paulo e Melissa
4   -O conceito de software público se diferencia do de software livre em alguns
5   -aspectos, destacando-se a atribuição de bem público ao software. Isso significa
6   -que o Governo, especificamente o MP, assume algumas responsabilidades que
7   -garantem ao usuário do software, em especial os órgãos públicos, condições
8   -adequadas de uso. Embora haja diferenças entre o que é um software livre e um
9   -software público brasileiro, há princípios comuns como a tendência da
10   -descentralização na tomada de decisões, do compartilhamento de informações e da
11   -retroalimentação. Por isso, a nova plataforma para o SPB foi pensada para
12   -contemplar ferramentas que promovam a colaboração e a interação nas comunidades
13   -(por gestores, usuários e desenvolvedores) dos projetos, conforme as práticas
14   -usadas nas comunidades de software livre. Isso inclui listas de e-mail, fóruns
15   -de discussão, issue trackers, sistemas de controle de versão e ambientes de
16   -rede social.
17   -
18   -Para integrar as ferramentas e prover a autenticação única nos serviços da
19   -plataforma, um sistema web chamado Colab, que funcionada como proxy reverso
20   -para os ambientes, está sendo evoluído. Em resumo, o Colab oferece a integração
21   -de busca, autenticação e apresentação, provendo um único ambiente ao usuário
22   -que tem em seu perfil algumas métricas de contribuições (e-mails para listas,
23   -inserções em wikis, cadastros de issue e commits nos repositórios).
24   -
25   -O Colab foi desenvolvido para o Interlegis (programa do Senado Federal). Por
26   -padrão, funciona integrado com o servidor de listas de e-mail GNU Mailman e
27   -utiliza o Apache Lucene Solr para a indexação dos conteúdos para as buscas. A
28   -partir de 2014, as ferramentas GitLab e Noosfero foram integradas ao Colab para
29   -compor o novo SPB.
30   -
31   -O GitLab é uma plataforma de desenvolvimento colaborativo social integrada ao
32   -sistema de controle de versão Git. É o ambiente mais técnico: os repositórios
33   -dos projetos do SPB, com páginas wiki, issue tracker e mecanismos de controle
34   -de versão de código estão nele. O Noosfero é uma plataforma para rede social e
35   -de economia solidária que contém funcionalidades de gerenciamento de conteúdos
36   -(CMS), além de permitir a configuração das páginas de usuários e de comunidades
37   -de forma flexível. É o ambiente de maior interação com o usuário do SPB, desde
38   -os cadastros até o acesso às páginas dos projetos para download, leitura de
39   -documentação e contato com os responsáveis.
40   -
41   -%TODO: Melissa
42   -The integration of collaborative environments goes beyond functional aspects.
43   -Offering the population an unified experience across these environments has been the key to encourage the use of the platform as it reduces the perception of the complexity.
44   -
45   -Thus the portal information architecture was redesigned to provide a transparent navigation and to reach users with different profiles.
46   -A process of harmonisation has been employed on the interaction models of each tool in order to reduce the learning curve.
47   -At the same time, a new visual style was created to unify the navegation experience and to comply with the guidelines of the digital communication identity pattern established by the Federal Government.
48   -
49   -With the increase of the system features and the addition of new tools, the visual style has steadily evolved in order to keep the navigation unified.
50   -Moreover, tools from different backgrounds, which in many cases run functionalities with similar concepts, made us face the challenge of developing a transparent interface that unifies various context.
51   -For each required feature, we often have to conciliate data with distinct structure and information pattern from each used tool. The interface was the meeting point for this data with links that users will not notice.
52   -The most common features (i.e. search, display and edition of profile information and content) have been brought in line with the structure and other existing features of the portal.
53   -
54   -The other challenge is related to responsive web design.
55   -The portal interface and each of its pages were designed following the bounds of responsiveness provided or supported by each tools.
56   -In particular, in the case of Noosfero, which do not have any oficial branch dedicated to improve its responsiveness, our project needed to engage with the expansion of this platform, where we made a lot of contributions and dialogues with the community and maintainers.
57   -All the project members got involved in the study, design and development of the Noosfero's new interface which support a responsive web design and that have not yet been completed.
58   -
59   -Users are part of the process.
60   -In 2014, a survey among users of the existing platform was conducted to identify usability problems and to measure their satisfaction with the system.
61   -After the release of the new SPB platform, several validations activities were implemented in 2015 and 2016, and the data colected during this phase helped to channel our efforts to identify and to improve the main fields of the new system.
62   -The aim was to bring the users closer to features that they have more interest and designing a navigation which deepens in accordance with the user's depth of knowledge.
63 1 \ No newline at end of file
  2 +\section{Platform for software collaborative development}
  3 +
  4 +According to the Brazilian Federal Government requirements, first, we needed an
  5 +application that integrates existing OSS systems and provides a similar
  6 +interface for each one, as well as, unique authentication. For that, we have a
  7 +web-based integration platform called Colab that also works as a reverse proxy.
  8 +We have developed its plug-in architecture to decouple the already integrated
  9 +tools (Trac system, GNU Mailman, and Apache Lucene Solr) and integrate other
  10 +platforms such as Noosfero, GitLab, and Mezuro. Figure \ref{fig:spb} shows the
  11 +home page of this integrated platform.
  12 +
  13 +\begin{figure}[hbt]
  14 + \centering
  15 + \includegraphics[width=.9\linewidth]{figures/home-SPB.png}
  16 + \caption{the new SPB Portal.}
  17 + \label{fig:spb}
  18 +\end{figure}
  19 +
  20 +Noosfero is a software to build social and collaboration networks, providing a
  21 +platform with blogs and CMS (Content Management System). It is the environment
  22 +with most SPB user interaction providing features since the user registration
  23 +until the project pages with documentation and contacts. GitLab is a web-based
  24 +Git repository manager with wiki pages and issue tracking features to support
  25 +the SPB software collaborative development. Mezuro is a platform to collect
  26 +source code metric to monitor the internal quality of softwares written in C,
  27 +C++, Java, Python, Ruby, and PHP.
  28 +
  29 +\begin{figure}[hbt]
  30 + \centering
  31 + \includegraphics[width=.8\linewidth]{figures/arquitetura.png}
  32 + \caption{SPB Architecture.}
  33 + \label{fig:architecture}
  34 +\end{figure}
  35 +
  36 +The new SPB Portal was deployed in 7 virtual machines with different functions,
  37 +as we can see in Figure \ref{fig:architecture}. The \textit{reverseproxy}
  38 +handles the HTTP requests and redirects them to the \textit{integration}, the
  39 +\textit{email} sends and receives e-mails on behalf of the platform and the
  40 +\textit{monitor} keeps the entire environment tracked. These three
  41 +\textit{VMs} mentioned - \textit{reverseproxy}, \textit{email} and
  42 +\textit{monitor} - are accessible via Internet and the other ones are only
  43 +available in the local network created between them.
  44 +
  45 +\textit{Integration} works as a second layer of proxy beneath
  46 +\textit{reverseproxy}, any request to the platform will be handled by it. The
  47 +Colab service provides interface, authentication and search engine integration
  48 +among all the services. When a request is received to a specific service, Colab
  49 +authenticates the user in the target tool, sends the request and makes a visual
  50 +transformation in the HTML page, which is the content of the response. Another
  51 +user-oriented feature is the integrated search engine, when the user want to
  52 +find something in the platform Colab will perform the search in the whole
  53 +databases. Colab itself provides a web interface for GNU Mailman and we have
  54 +two others integrated tools in \textit{integration}: Gitlab and Prezento (the
  55 +front-end of Mezuro).
  56 +
  57 +The source code static analysis is performed by \textit{mezuro}. It runs some
  58 +static analysis tools on source code stored in repository and provides this
  59 +data to Prezento. A social networking and CMS is provided by Noosfero in
  60 +\textit{social}, and the databases of all tools with a cache service are in
  61 +\textit{database}.
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