hifis-surveyval 1.0.0

This project is used to develop analysis scripts for the HIFIS Software survey.

HIFIS-Surveyval

This project is used to develop analysis scripts for the HIFIS Software survey.

Table of Content

• Installation
• Getting Started
• Start Analysis from Command-Line-Interface
• Contribute with Own Analysis Scripts
• Resources
• Author Information
• Contributors
• License

Getting Started

The project's documentation contains a section to help you as a user of the analysis scripts to run the analysis scripts or as a developer of the framework to set up the development environment.

Getting Started for Users

Installation

To install the package locally, you can use Pip.

pip install hifis-surveyval

After the installation, you can use the tool from the command line with hifis-surveyval --help.

Getting Started for Developers

Installation

To install the package locally, you can use Poetry.

Using Poetry

If you want to actively contribute changes to the project, you are required to also install the development packages alongside the framework.

git clone https://gitlab.hzdr.de/hifis/surveys/hifis-surveyval.git
cd hifis-surveyval
poetry install

After the installation, you can use the tool from the command line with poetry run hifis-surveyval --help

Poetry installs some packages that are required for performing quality checks. Usually they are also performed via GitLab CI, but can also be executed locally.

It is common practice to run some checks locally before pushing them online. Therefore, execute below commands:

$ # Order your imports
$ isort -rc .
$ make lint

The following documentation references the pip installation. You can use the same commands with a poetry installation, if you prefix your commands with poetry run COMMAND.

Start Analysis from Command-Line-Interface

The survey analysis package is a program to be executed on the Command-Line-Interface (CLI).

Quick Start Example: Run Analysis

Due to sensible defaults of the project's configurations you need to have the analysis scripts as well as metadata and data files in certain locations in order to run the survey analysis. Please put your analysis scripts into a sub-folder called scripts. Make sure that the file meta.yml is put into sub-folder metadata. Finally, copy the data-CSV-file for example from the wiki page of the associated GitLab project Survey about current Development Practice into a central location like a data sub-folder and tell the program the path to that data file.

Now you can do the following to start the survey analysis from the CLI:

hifis-surveyval analyze data/<data_file_name>.csv

The output is then put into a sub-folder within the folder output which is named after the stamp of the current date-time if not specified differently.

Caution: Depending on the Operating System used an issue with the file encoding might occur. There might be data-CSV-files around which are encoded with UTF-8-BOM which causes errors when read in on Windows OS. In this case you need to change the encoding to UTF-8 before running the survey analysis.

Flags

The program accepts two flags:

1. Help flag
2. Verbosity flag

Help flag

Calling the program with the help-flag is the first thing to do when being encountered with this program. It outputs a so-called Usage-message to the CLI:

$ hifis-surveyval --help

Please issue this command on the CLI and read the detailed Usage-message before continuing with reading the documentation of the Usage-message here.

Verbosity flag

The verbosity-flag can be provided in order to specify the verbosity of the output to the CLI. This flag is called --verbose or -v for short:

hifis-surveyval --verbose <COMMAND>

hifis-surveyval -v <COMMAND>

The verbosity of the output can be increased even more by duplicating the flag --verbose or -v up to two times:

hifis-surveyval --verbose --verbose --verbose <COMMAND>

hifis-surveyval -vvv <COMMAND>

Commands

There are three different commands implemented which come with its own set of flags and parameters:

1. Command version
2. Command init
3. Command analyze

Command version

The version command outputs the version number of this CLI-program like so:

hifis-surveyval version

Command init

Before you start the analysis you may want to change the defaults of the configuration variables. In order to do so, you can create a configuration file that is named hifis-surveyval.yml by issuing the init command:

hifis-surveyval init

This file contains the following information:

METADATA: metadata/meta.yml
OUTPUT_FOLDER: output
OUTPUT_FORMAT: PNG
SCRIPT_FOLDER: scripts
SCRIPT_NAMES: []

First of all, each analysis needs metadata about the questions asked in the survey and answers that participants may give. This metadata file is by default located in a folder called metadata and named meta.yml.

Second, you may specify the output folder which is named output by default.

Third, you may prefer a specific output format like PDF, PNG, SVG or SCREEN. The default value is PNG. Note: Be aware that other output formats like text or markdown files may be created, which depends largely upon the implementation of the analysis scripts.

Fourth, you may specify the folder which contains the analysis scripts, which is the scripts folder by default.

Finally, you may select a subset of the analysis scripts available as a list that ought to be executed. This list is empty by default, which means, all scripts are executed.

Command analyze

The more interesting command is the analyze command which comes with a data-parameter. The data-parameter can not be omitted and need to be given explicitly in order to be able to start the analysis. This is an example of how to do the analysis:

hifis-surveyval analyze data/<data_file_name>.csv

Contribute with Own Analysis Scripts

Essential Requirements for Developing Own Analysis Scripts

As you might have read in the previous sections the actual analysis scripts reside in a specific folder called scripts. All scripts in that folder will be automatically discovered by the package hifis-surveyval when running the analysis. In order that the program recognizes the scripts in that folder as analysis scripts they need to fulfill the following two criteria:

1. The filename need to end on .py.
2. The file need to contain a function called run without any parameters.

"""
A dummy script for testing the function dispatch

.. currentmodule:: hifis_surveyval.scripts.dummy
.. moduleauthor:: HIFIS Software <[e-mail]>
"""

def run():
    print("Example Script")

If both requirements are satisfied the program will execute the run-functions of the analysis scripts in an arbitrary order.

File-System Structure of the Core Component

$ tree hifis_surveyval/
hifis_surveyval/
├── answer.py
├── cli.py
├── core
│   ├── environment.py
│   ├── __init__.py
│   └── settings.py
├── data.py
├── dispatch.py
├── globals.py
├── __init__.py
├── plot.py
├── question.py
└── util.py

Resources

Below are some handy resource links:

• Project Documentation
• Click is a Python package for creating beautiful command line interfaces in a composable way with as little code as necessary.
• Sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation, written by Geog Brandl and licnsed under the BSD license.
• pytest helps you write better programs.
• GNU Make is a tool which controls the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the program's source files.

Author Information

HIFIS-Surveyval was created by HIFIS Software Services.

Contributors

We would like to thank and give credits to the following contributors of this project:

• Be the first to be named here!

License

Copyright © 2021 HIFIS Software [e-mail]

This work is licensed under the following license(s):

• Everything else is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later

Please see the individual files for more accurate information.

Hint: We provided the copyright and license information in accordance to the REUSE Specification 3.0.