CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2018/E1814 Write unit tests for collusion cycle.rb

Introduction

Team

Zhewei Hu (zhu6) (mentor)

• Cameron Nelson (cenelso3)
• Peter Shore (pnshore)
• Robert Montgomery (rjmontgo)

Background

Expertiza

Expertiza is an open source project that can be used by instructors to create assignments and assign them to students. Students can manage teams for the assignment and submit work for each of the assignments. After the students have submitted their work they can review other student's work to facilitate grading. The project is based on the Ruby on Rails framework. You can find our GitHub Repo to view our work.

Collusion Cycles

The collusion cycle model is used to handle situations where a cycle is created when students are reviewing each other's work. The cycles in the review relationships are common since each assignment to review is randomly selected. The collusion cycle model calculates the assignment scores from the reviewers as well as other statistics such as similarity and difference between each score. The model is built to handle two, three, and four node cycles where each node represents a student.

Motivation

Achieving good coverage with quality tests is part of a good development process. The collusion_cycle.rb class is used to calculate the grade received based on the reviews from other students as well as handle cases where the reviewer is also reviewed by the reviewee effectively creating a cycle. We want to test this class to achieve good coverage in order to catch possible bugs in the program and ensure that it works correctly.

Test Plan

Tasks Identified

• Test Two-Node Cycle
  1. When the reviewers of the current reviewer (ap) do not include the current assignment participant it should skip this reviewer (ap) and return the corresponding collusion cycle
  2. When the reviewers of the current reviewer (ap) include the current assignment participant and the assignment participant is not reviewed by the current reviewer it should skip the reviewer (ap) and return the corresponding collusion cycle.
  3. When the reviewers of the current reviewer (ap) include the current assignment participant and when the current assignment participant was reviewed by the current reviewer (ap) it should insert the related information and return the corresponding collusion cycle.
  4. When the reviewers of the current reviewer (ap) include the current assignment participant and the assignment participant did not submit a review of the current reviewer (ap) it should skip the current reviewer (ap) and return the corresponding collusion cycle.
  5. When the reviewers of the current reviewer (ap) include the current assignment participant and the assignment participant did submit a review of the current reviewer (ap) it should skip the current reviewer (ap) and return the corresponding collusion cycle.
• Test Four-Node Cycle
  1. When the reviewers of the current reviewer (ap2) do not include the current assignment participant it should skip the current reviewer (ap2) and return the corresponding collusion cycle.
  2. When the reviewers of the current reviewer (ap2) include the current assignment participant and the current assignment participant did not receive a review from the current reviewee (ap1) it should skip the current reviewer (ap2) and return the corresponding collusion cycle.
  3. When the reviewers of the current reviewer (ap2) include the current assignment participant and the current assignment participant received a review from the current reviewee (ap1) it should insert the related information and return the corresponding collusion cycle.
  4. When the reviewers of the current reviewer (ap2) include the current assignment participant and the current reviewee (ap1) received a review from the current reviewer (ap2) it should insert the related information and return the corresponding collusion cycle.
  5. When the reviewers of the current reviewer (ap2) include the current assignment participant and the current
• Test Cycle Similarity Score
• Test Cycle Deviation Score

Writing the Cycle Tests

Each of the tests are very similar in the way they are tested. With the addition of each node in the cycle, the underlying process remains the same. This means that only the number of branches increases, which is the only reason there are more tests in the Four-Node Cycle section then there are in the Two-Node Cycle section. To test the cycles we used stubs to create the relationships between each of the assignment participants in a before-each block before each cycle tests. Then we applied the changes specified to test each branch. To break up the code more easily we separated the testing of each branch into a context block that provided additional information about the test itself as well as making the code look much neater.

Impact Analysis

Currently, we have already found one bug, which was a missing parameter in the collusion_cycle.rb file with each of the node_cycle methods (two_node_cycle, three_node_cycle, four_node_cycle) which needed an assignmentparticipant parameter to be passed in for the function to even work. In addition the obvious benefit of adding more coverage you a better assurance that the code works well. Of course testing does not guarantee that the code works, but can only be used to find where the code does not work.

Running the Test Files

To run the test files you need to clone the repository in an Expertiza environment Expertiza Github. Instructions for creating an appropriate Expertiza environment can be found in the README file in the Expertiza GitHub repository.

Once you have the Expertiza repository setup make sure you are in the root directory of the app and run `rspec spec/models/collusion_cycle_spec.rb`

Future Work

Because the scope of this addition is relatively small, and we have tested all possible branches within the code there is not much future work to do other than possibly refactor the code with a more efficient tool. Test coverage through quality tests consistently added throughout the development of the Expertiza project should be the future work of the project.