GSoC 2015 — Moorsp Plagiarism Plugin for Moodle

In an attempt to recover some posts from my old blog, I am moving some posts from 2015 regarding my 3rd GSoC outing with Moodle to Medium.

For the 3rd time in my life, I have been selected as a Google Summer of Code student (after mentoring for the past 2 years, I might add) to work on a project for Moodle.

Moodle is one of the most prominent and widely-used Free and Open Source Learning Management Systems in the world today, and has a widespread developer community. I had particular interest in Moodle because it is the LMS used by most Sri Lankan universities to manage their degree programmes, which speaks volumes for the robustness and feature-rich nature of Moodle. Moodle development is done through PHP and MySQL.

My project involves the development of Moorsp; a skeleton plagiarism plugin for Moodle which integrates with the plagiarism framework within the system. The purpose of this plugin is to provide an effective testing mechanism for the plagiarism framework, as all current plagiarism plugins connect to commercial 3rd party APIs and testing them is not possible without a paid account. Moorsp will integrate with the plagiarism framework, implementing all its hooks and events, thereby providing a platform for acceptance tests (Behat) to be written for the plagiarism framework itself. This would provide a free plugin that could be utilized for regression runs during continuous integration on Moodle.

GSoC is in the Community Bonding phase at the moment. I have been engaging with the community on their forums and have also provided some Behat feature files for QA tests that were not yet automated.

I’m pretty excited, and looking forward to a great summer with this awesome organization!