Inspiration

As a group of developers we routinely leave comments to go back and fix or correct a certain piece of ugly code. As time starts to pass, the amount of time we have to fix is reduced and they start to pile up. But when that small time window opens to go and fix your past mistakes, you can't find them! Whatodo was built to try and help developers find their own comments to go and address certain shortcomings when initially writing their code.

How it works

The program has two components:

Command Line Tool
Web Application

Command Line Tool

The command line tool is a simple python program that can parse a developers source code and extract the comments with the keywords indicating that its a actionable item, like TODO or FIXME.

For more info see: whatodo on Github

Web Application

The web application is a wrapper around this command line tool to help developers even further. It can create issues on Github via their API and resolve them when it detects a TODO has been resolved. It has a simple and easy to use interface with no need for additional logins.

The system authenticates with Github and allows you to select a branch of each repository to keep track of and create and resolve issues automatically.

Experiences

The team gained a lot of experience working with the Github API and learning about language parsing and detecting(Its a huge field!).

What's next

The next steps are to refine the web interface and the detection of changing issues by updating them instead of resolving and creating a new one once a todo tag is changed.

Additionally we would like to see the language detection tool improved, but this is a huge undertaking.