[Insight-developers] IJ Volunteers : THE MATRIX : RED PILL

[Luis Ibanez]

Hi Torsten,


You bring up several good points:



1) There is a limit to the hassles that volunteers will go through
    in order to give their code away to the community.

    After all, you are right, they are not paid for doing so.

    The tricky question then is:

         How do we (the ITK community) ensure the quality
         of new code that goes into the toolkit ?

    We were expecting that "community reviews" was a good answer to
    this issue. The assumption was that from 1,200 (known) users
    who enjoy using the toolkit for free, triplets of them will be
    willing to review a paper from time to time. After all, they are
    the ones that will use that contributed code later on.

    Unfortunately, what we have learned so far is that it takes a
    lot of energy to motivate users to participate of the peer-review
    process. From the social point of view, this is has hard as
    getting people out of their houses and bringing them to vote
    on election day.




2) I may have to disagree with the statement that writing tests and
    documentation is "different" from writing code. Source code that
    has not been tested and documented is not "complete" source code,
    and will cost many times its development price in maintenance
    headaches and Hara-Kiris of future developers and users. It is a
    well known fact in software engineering that 80% of the cost of
    software development goes in maintenance, after the code has been
    declared to be "completed", and most of this maintenance cost is
    spent by "other" developers reading the code and trying to
    understand what the code does, even before they can retouch it.

    The simple rule is :  If it is not tested, it does not work.
                          If it not documented, it will be misused.





3) They IJ has some contributions that are unrelated to ITK and
    it will be desirable to create a separate section only for ITK.

    I agree with this suggestion. This will also make easier for
    other toolkits such as VTK and IGSTK to use the IJ as community
    resource.





       Regards,



          Luis



-------------------------
Torsten Rohlfing wrote:
> 
> Hi everyone --
> 
> Little as I want to get myself into the middle of a heated argument, I'd 
> like to throw in a few thoughts of my own. I also may have missed pieces 
> of the discussion thus far, so my apologies if I am bringing up things 
> that have already been addressed.
> 
> First, I have a comment on Zach's suggestion to increase review activity 
> for the IJ by accepting submissions only from people who have provided 
> at least three reviews for other papers. While I appreciate the problem 
> of getting reviews (trust me, I do), here's the perspective of someone 
> who effectively stopped contributing code to ITK when the whole IJ 
> process was implemented: I don't get paid to provide code to ITK, much 
> less to write test cases and documentation (still, I see why these are 
> necessary, so I'll do it). I am getting paid, however, to write code, 
> and I do believe it has some value.
> 
> Now if I choose to make the result of my work freely available to 
> others, then there is a clear limit as to how much I will allow myself 
> to be hassled in order to be permitted to give my work away. Writing an 
> IJ paper to accompany the code has so far been a bit of a threshold for 
> me because I am simply to busy. Being required to review other works 
> first before I can even think of submitting a paper, well, let's just 
> say it would be pretty much a guarantee that at least this potential 
> developer would never contribute anything ever again.
> 
> Okay, this may have been pretty pointed, so before I draw the wrath of 
> everyone involved upon me, let me backpaddle a little: all I am saying 
> is that most code contributions to ITK, and definitely those from 
> parties not funded by any related NIH projects, are essentially gifts. 
> And in my opinion, the ITK community would be well-advised to not 
> "punish" folks for wanting to make such gifts. That is, if the community 
> agrees that such contributions are valuable.
> 
> A second point I would like to make, and completely unrelated to 
> anything above: I have noticed that there are a few papers on the IJ 
> that are not really about contributions to ITK. In fact, there are some 
> where the source code of the software is not even available (I'll be 
> happy to dig up examples). This leads me to wonder:
> 
> If the primary purpose of the IJ is to review code contributions to ITK, 
> should submissions that are not concerned with such contributions even 
> be allowed? If they are, they may take reviewing capacity away from the 
> "worthy" papers, and it also makes it necessary for the interested 
> readers to dig through a paper to find out whether or not they can 
> simply download and try the code or not. On the other hand, if the IJ is 
> intended to be more than a channel for code into ITK, then maybe it 
> should be split into separate sections?
> 
> All that said, I don't want to appear all negative. So I just went and 
> updated my review preferences for the IJ, and I promise I'll make an 
> effort to start reviewing papers after MICCAI. If you guys also still 
> need volunteers to function as AEs for the IJ (I lost the invitation 
> email), then I'd be happy to do that as well.
> 
> Best,
>  Torsten
> 
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