CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2024 - E2408. Refactor course.rb and course team.rb models

Team

Members

• Daksh Mehta, (unityID:dmehta4, GitHub:dakshmehta23)
• Soham Patil, (unityID:sspatil6@ncsu.edu, GitHub:ThErOCk07)
• Unnati Bukhariya, (unityID:ubukhar2@ncsu.edu, GitHub:unnzzz)

Mentor

• Ameya Vaichalkar, (unityID:agvaicha, GitHub:ameyagv)

Expertiza Overview

Background

Expertiza is an open-source software written using Ruby on Rails which functions as a learning management software system. It has many different functions and abilities including the ability to create assignments, quizzes, assignment groups, and topics, and also a complete mechanism for providing peer reviews and feedback for other groups and other teammates. It is used in select courses at NC State and by professors at several other colleges and universities.

course.rb and course_team.rb models are objects containing information about the course and their associated teams respectively. CourseTeams are used when an instructor wants to use the same teams for the entire semester. CourseTeam is one subclass of Team ; AssignmentTeam is the other. An AssignmentTeam is a team that is created for students to do a single assignment. It is possible to copy CourseTeams to an assignment, where they become AssignmentTeams, or vice versa.

The Course and CourseTeam models had some code smells/issues that were fixed. There were a few methods in these models that shouldn’t be in those models, and a few methods that are no longer used. Certain method names were refactored in order to better understand their functionality.

Requirements

The following changes were made to the models course.rb and course_team.rb

course.rb

• The method get_participant was removed.

We performed a global search to see where all this method is being used. It was found that the function was not used anywhere else in the app and hence it was removed along with its respective rspec test.

• The method add_member was removed.

We found that add_member was present in the team class. Since Course_team is a subclass of Team it makes sense to leave the functionality in Team class itself to make the code more coherent and modular.

• Rename copy_participants.

After reading the function definition it made sense to rename the method to copy_assignment_participants since the method is specific to assignments. The new function name gives a better idea and clarity about what the function does.

• Improve error handling.

The methods add_participant and copy_assignment_participants were refactored to improve the error handling and code readability. We created a new method called "handle_errors" to raise any errors that the methods may encounter. This helped us to separate the error handling from the main function logic and made the code easier to understand.

• Others

Some other small changes were made such as using find_by instead of where.first to make SQL queries to the model, using "errors.any?" instead of unless "errors.empty?" and adding comments to the code.

course_team.rb

• Delete assignment_id method in CourseTeam class since it is no longer required.
• Refactor Course.find(id) to Course.find(course_id) for better understandability of the code.
• Refactor the copy method in CourseTeam class to something that better describes its functionality.

Other Changes

Fixed tests to incorporate the new changes in the code.