CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2018/E1813 Test Menu Items Model

This wiki page is for the description of changes made under E1813 OSS Assignment for Spring 2018, CSC/ECE 517.

Introduction

Expertiza

Expertiza is an open source web application based on Ruby on Rails framework, supported by the National Science Foundation. It is a place where students can submit and peer-review learning objects (assignments, codes, write ups, websites, etc). For an instructor, expertiza allows to create and customize new or existing assignments. For students, it allows to create and work on various projects and assignments. It provides a platform to peer review other students' submissions across various document types, including the URLs and wiki pages.

Test Driven-Development

Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development process that relies on the repetition of a very short development cycle: Requirements are turned into very specific test cases, then the software is improved to pass the new tests, only. This is opposed to software development that allows software to be added that is not proven to meet requirements. Advantages of using TDD:

• Narrowing Problem Focus
• Tidier Code
• Not worrying about dependencies
• Easier refactoring
• Better Test coverage and fewer bugs

Unit Testing

Unit Testing is a software testing method by which individual units of source code are tested to catch errors early in the development process. For a model it involves testing the interface and on how it responds to commands and queries from outside. Model testing is bounded to the functionality of only the model under test and doesn't test how its collaborating models get affected based on this query.

Problem Statement

This project is to write unit tests using rspec for menu_items.rb model. It is to test all class and instance methods used in this file. The unit tests are to be written to make the path coverage of menu_item.rb more than 90% and achieve the highest possible branch coverage.

Files Involved

The files to be understood and created are:

1. app/models/menu_items.rb

2. spec/models/menu_items_spec.rb

Team Members

Students who collaborated to work on this problem statement are :

1. Harish Pullagurla ( hpullag@ncsu.edu )

2. Kalyan Ghosh (kghosh@ncsu.edu)

3. Sandeep Rajendran(srajend@ncsu.edu)

Plan Of Work

The task in hand was to write test cases for testing the menu_items model file. No Rspec file for the corresponding model exists so there was a need to create a new file and build tests from scratch. For this purposes different sub tasks involved

1. Setting up the Expertiza environment

2. Understand the functionality of model file in menu_items.rb

3. Understand the linked data attributes being used, like controller_actions, content_page, permissions_id

4. Creating dummy entries for testing different functionalities.

5. Writing testing conditions for different functions and cross checking with the expected outputs.

Implementation Steps

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.

References

1. Expertiza on GitHub
2. GitHub Project Repository Fork
3. The live Expertiza website
4. Demo link
5. Expertiza project documentation wiki
6. Rspec Documentation
7. Clean Code: A handbook of agile software craftsmanship. Author: Robert C Martin