quiz-app: the Android scholarship cohort project

The app exists because of a three month challenge

The project is described as a collaborative project made by the Google Udacity Android Developer Scholars, and that context explains almost every requirement. The scholars worked through a structured programme with quizzes attached to it, and one of the stated purposes is access to the quiz material for revision even after the three months challenge has ended. That is the item that turns an app into an archive rather than a practice tool, since without it the useful life of a quiz ends with the cohort's own deadline. The other stated purpose is simply that attempting all the quizzes will be easy for everyone, which is the baseline goal the rest of the list refines: reminders and notifications for the quizzes, easy management of quizzes, and keeping track of all attempted quizzes rather than relying on memory.

Five purposes, and one of them is not about quizzes

The purpose list has five items and the fifth is the odd one out. Four concern the quiz work itself: making all the quizzes easy to attempt, sending reminders and notifications about them, keeping revision access after the three months challenge, and tracking which quizzes have been attempted. The fifth is a resource search feature, described as useful Android resources found from a search keyword. That is a different product inside the same app, aimed at the other half of what a developer in a scholarship does, which is reading about Android rather than being tested on it. Nothing in the README says how the two halves relate, whether the resource search shares the same accounts or the same screens, so whether it shipped as part of the same product is not something this repository will tell you.

Pull requests go to development, and the default branch is master

There is one line in the README that will save a new contributor a rejected pull request: create the pull request to the development branch. That instruction is worth noticing because the default branch in this repository is master, so the branch you land on by cloning is not the branch you are asked to target. That arrangement is normal for a volunteer project that keeps a stable line and an integration line, but it is invisible unless you read the README. The rest of the on-ramp is documents rather than code. There is a CONTRIBUTING.md in the repository to start with, a code style guidelines page in the wiki to read before committing anything, an app requirements wiki, a project boards page, and an app mockups wiki holding the mockups for all screens. Requirements, screens and process live in three different places.

Requirements live in wikis, questions live in Slack

The communication channels are as specific as the branch. Questions go to a Slack channel named for the project, #cp_quiz_app, on the Android Developers India scholars workspace, and that is the only support route the README gives; there is no issue tracker guidance beyond the pull request instruction. Understanding comes from three linked artefacts. There is a video hosted on Google Drive that the README offers for better understanding, a prototype link on invis.io pointing at a dark theme home screen, and a YouTube link about how to contribute to collaborative projects along with the basics of git and GitHub, which tells you the intended reader is someone who has not done this before. Put together, the documentation strategy is: watch, look at the mockup, learn the tools, then read the contributing guide. None of it is in the repository except the contributing guide.

Three mods and four co-mods are named, with their handles

The README credits seven people with GitHub handles attached, which is unusual to find in a student project and useful when you need to know who answers a question. Three are listed as mods: Aditi Soni, Vishal Sehgal and Parth Joshi. Four are listed as co-mods: Kaushal Dhruw, Vansh Badkul, Sagarsrao and Thayumaanavan. That division of seven people for a scholarship cohort project also tells you the intended shape of a contribution, since a pull request to the development branch goes to a maintainer group rather than to an individual. The README opens by thanking people for showing interest and asking them to work together on it, which is consistent with how the project was run: as an open invitation rather than a curated roadmap.

A standard Gradle project with one app module

The repository itself is unremarkable in the best way. At the root there is an app/ directory holding the Android application, a build.gradle and a settings.gradle for the Gradle build, gradle.properties, a gradle/ directory with the wrapper configuration, gradlew and gradlew.bat for Unix and Windows, a .gitignore, the CONTRIBUTING.md, a docs/ directory and a single vector asset, india_text.svg, sitting at the root rather than in the app resources. The primary language recorded for the project is Java, which is the expected language for a cohort project of this vintage and for a build that predates the Kotlin tooling most Android projects use today. There is no library module, no continuous integration configuration referenced in the README, and no test or lint instructions, so the repository tells you what to contribute but not how your change will be verified.

Three releases inside a week, then nothing after October 2018

The release history is short and compressed. Version 1.0, labelled the first version of the quiz app, was published on 14 May 2018, v1.1.3 followed later the same day, and v1.1.4 on 20 May 2018. So the entire tagged history of the app covers one week in May 2018, which is consistent with a project built to a challenge deadline. The last recorded push to the repository is 7 October 2018, several months after the final release, which suggests cleanup and documentation work rather than further features. The repository is not archived, the default branch is master, and there is no licence file at the root, only the README and the contributing guide. Anyone planning to build on this code should settle the licensing question first, because nothing in the repository states one.

Editorial conclusion

quiz-app fits anyone looking at how a scholarship cohort organised a shared codebase, since the contribution rules are unusually explicit and the documentation split between repository and wiki is a useful example of how a volunteer project hands work to newcomers. Three things to know before you clone it. Pull requests go to the development branch while the default branch is master, which is the first thing to get right. Nearly all requirements live in wiki pages rather than in the repository, so the README alone will not tell you what to build. And the project stopped moving in 2018, with the last release in May and the last commit in October, so treat it as a finished artefact to study rather than a codebase to extend. Java, no licence file at the root, maintainers named in the README.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Official README
2. Project repository
3. Release notes