CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2019 - E1944. Refactor review mapping controller

This wiki page is for the description of changes made under E1555 OSS assignment for Fall 2015, CSC/ECE 517.

Expertiza Background

Expertiza is an educational web application created and maintained by the joint efforts of the students and the faculty at NC State University. It’s an open-source project developed on Ruby on Rails platform and its codebase is available on Github. It facilitates peer review among the students allowing them to improve their work from the feedback. It also assists the faculty in customizing the specifications for the projects and Assignments.

Description of the current project

The following is an Expertiza based OSS project which deals primarily with a controller namely review_mapping_controller.rb. It focusses on refactoring some of the more complex methods, modifying some of the language to make it more Ruby friendly, removing redundant code etc among the other things. The goal of this project is to attempt to make this part of the application easier to read and maintain.

Files modified in current project

A controller and a helper file were modified for this project namely:
1. review_mapping_controller.rb
2. review_mapping_controller_spec.rb
3. assign_quiz_controller.rb
4. assign_quiz_controller_spec.rb
5. review_response_map_controller.rb
6. review_response_map_controller_spec.rb
7. routes.rb
8. Other views & partials associated affected by these changes

ReviewMappingController

This controller will map the submissions made by the teams to the students for facilitating peer-reviewing. A couple of long and complex methods such as peer_review_strategy and automatic_review_mapping were refactored from this controller along with the removal of some non-related methods such as add_calibration and assign_quiz_dynamically. Variable names have been changed and code has been modularized and helper methods were separated from the important methods into a module and were included in the class.

Test Cases were created for the newly created controllers such as assign_quiz_controller etc.

review_mapping_controller_spec.rb

Tests were removed from this file which belongs to the isolated methods.

AssignQuizController

Assigning Quizzes (Quizzes are also stored in the Assignment table) is not a seemingly/semantically related task to review mapping. Hence this was moved into a separate controller.

assign_quiz_controller_spec.rb

Tests related to assign_quiz_controller were moved into this file.

assign_quiz_controller_spec.rb

Tests related to assign_quiz_controller were moved into this file.

List of changes

We worked on the following work items(WIs)
WI1 : Refactor calculate_all_penalties method into smaller methods
WI2 : Move the repeated code in conflict_notification & edit methods to a separate method list_questions.
WI3 : Refactor the code as per the Ruby style guidelines and incorporate the good practices
WI4 : Test the conflict_notification method to test the changes made.
WI5 : Move the repeated code in view and view_my_scores methods to a separate method retrieve_questions
WI6 : Change the repeated varaible decalreation and put into single common block.
WI7 : Change ambiguous variable names in more sensible variable names

Solutions Implemented and Delivered

• Refactoring calculate_all_penalties method

This is used to calculate various penalty values for each assignment if penalty is applicable.

The following changes were made:

1. This method was very complex, performing too many functions within a single method and had to be broken into 3 smaller methods each having a more well defined function. 2. The following 3 methods were created after splitting the first method

  i.  calculate_all_penalties

  ii. calculate_penatly_attributes

  iii. assign_all_penalties

3. Changes were also made to make the code follow ruby style.The language was made more ruby friendly. 4. Finally some redundant code was commented out as it was non-functional.

Refactoring into smaller more specific methods:

Removal of non-functional code :

Change of language to make it more Ruby friendly:

• Move the redundant piece of code from conflict_notification & edit methods to a new method list_questions

The conflict_notification method is used to help the instructors decide if one of the reviews are unfair or inaccurate. This was again split into 2 methods with some part of the code which is repeated in another method refactored into a new method.

Refactored #Created a method which was a duplicate in conflict_notification and edit methods

edit method:

This method is used to edit the questionnaires. This method again has code which is repeated in the conflict_notification method and thus the repeated section was split into a new method.

New method: Refactored #Created a method which was a duplicate in conflict_notification and edit methods

Similar refactoring was performed to obtain the retrieve_questions method:

This is the new method created after the above refactoring:

Testing Details

RSpec

There were no existing test cases for the GradesController. We have added a new spec file 'grades_spec.rb' which covers testing scenario for the newly added method. The specs were run on the previous and current files and they return the same results implying that the refactored code does not break anything. As the model was not changed, no test cases were added for the model.

UI Testing

Following steps needs to be performed to test this code from UI:
1. Login as instructor. Create a course and an assignment under that course.
2. Keep the has team checkbox checked while creating the assignment. Add a grading rubric to it. Add at least two students as participants to the assignment.
3. Create topics for the assignment.
4. Sign in as one of the students who were added to the assignment.
5. Go to the assignment and sign up for a topic.
6. Submit student's work by clicking 'Your work' under that assignment.
7. Sign in as a different student which is participant of the assignment.
8. Go to Assignments--><assignment name>-->Others' work (If the link is disabled, login as instructor and change the due date of the assignment to current time).
9. Give reviews on first student's work.
10. Login as instructor or first student to look at the review grades.

Scope for future improvement

1. The construct_table method in GradesHelper is not used anywhere. It has no reference in the project. So we feel it can be safely removed.
2. The has_team_and_metareview? method in GradesHelper can be broken down into separate methods, one each for team and metareview. This will provide improved flexibility. It needs some analysis though, as both the entities(team & metareview) are currently checked in conjuction from all the views they are referenced from.