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T4 (Time & Task Tracker)

Overview

T4 (Time & Task Tracker) is a vision-stage project focused on understanding and improving developer productivity within CSED projects.

The concept is to build a GitHub-integrated tool that can:

  • Track tasks across repositories and projects
  • Analyze how developer time is spent across issues, pull requests, and discussions
  • Provide dashboards and metrics to inform sprint planning and workload balancing

By leveraging GitHub metadata and lightweight time signals, T4 aims to help both researchers and practitioners study software development workflows and team dynamics.

Position in the Ecosystem

flowchart LR
  Teams[Student Teams & Developers] --> Repos[Project Repositories]
  Repos --> T4[T4<br/>Time & Task Tracking]
  T4 --> Insights[Productivity & Workflow Insights]

  UMACS[UMACS<br/>Auth Service] --> T4

Status

T4 is currently in the Vision & Research phase, with ideas and requirements being collected in the GitHub discussion. No stable implementation has been established yet.

title: "Git Task Server" short_description: "A backend service for managing Git-based tasks and assignments." status: "Early Development" growth_stage: "Seed" # 🌰 stack: - "Python" - "FastAPI" - "Dockerfile" links: - type: "github" url: "https://github.com/csed-ucm/git-task-server" tags: - "Backend" - "Education" - "Dev Productivity"

Overview

The Git Task Server is a backend service designed for Git-centric coursework:

  • Manage programming tasks and assignments backed by Git repositories
  • Automate cloning, branch creation, and basic validation workflows
  • Provide a structured API that other tools (e.g., dashboards, LMS plugins) can call

This project can support:

  • Intro programming courses that use GitHub/GitLab
  • Capstone or project-based courses with repository-per-team setups
  • Research on student development workflows and productivity

Example Use Case

Assignment Lifecycle

  1. Instructor defines an assignment template repository
  2. Git Task Server provisions per-student or per-team repositories
  3. Students commit and push their work
  4. CI pipelines or custom scripts run tests / static analysis
  5. Results are pulled back into dashboards or grading tools

Role in the CSED Platform

Git Task Server can integrate with:

  • UMACS for identity and access control
  • Student Team Formation / OptiTeam to map teams to repositories
  • Org-level CI workflows in .github for automated grading or analytics
flowchart LR
  Instructor --> API[Git Task Server API]
  API --> Git[Git Hosting<br/>(e.g., GitHub)]
  Teams[Student Teams<br/>(OptiTeam)] --> API
  API --> CI[CI / Testing Pipelines]

Status

  • Status: Early development / design
  • Next steps:
  • Define core domain models (Task, Assignment, Submission, RepoLink)
  • Implement basic provisioning workflows for repositories
  • Integrate with UMACS for authentication/authorization