CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2015/oss E1574 BKS

Expertiza is a web application where students can submit and peer-review learning objects (articles, code, web sites, etc). It is used in select courses at NC State and by professors at several other colleges and universities. <ref>Expertiza on GitHub</ref>

Introduction

Our contribution to this project is to write feature tests for assignment submission by student. The tests would mock steps taken by the student when he/she manually submit the assignment.

Problem Statement

Once an assignment is created by the instructor the only call to action for the student is to submit the assignment. Currently, there is no feature test for assignment submission. The goal is to understand the flow of the assignment submission by student manually and mock this flow in the Feature Tests using RSpec and Capybara framework.

Motivation

Once the application is built, it is necessary to test its functionality. More importantly, it is essential to test the functionality from users perspective. Feature spec allows testing of your application's functionality from the outside either by simulating a browser or by headless browser simulation. By manually clicking on the interface, the tests can discover bugs in the system and so has ours.

Assumptions

To successfully implement each scenario in the test, the following assumptions are taken:

1. The feature test will use the development environment. In particular, it will use the expertiza_development database.
2. An instructor entry is assumed to be present in the database. The credentials for this instructor is instructor6 as username and password as password.
3. A student entry is also assumed to be present in the database. The credentials for this student is student13 as username and password as password.
4. The assignment created for testing contain no teams and topic for selection.

Steps for manual submission

Before analyzing code, one must familiarize themselves with the steps involved in assignment submission by student on Expertiza. The steps involved are:

1. Login with valid student username and password
2. Click on an assignment to submit
3. Click on "Your Work"
4. Paste the link or browse to the file containing your work
5. Click on "Upload Link" or "Upload File" to submit deliverable

Creating the Tests

Gems involved

The gems used in feature testing are rspec-rails and capybara

rspec-rails

Rspec-rails is a testing framework for Rails 3.x and 4.x. It supports testing of models, controllers, requests, features, views and routes. It does this by accepting test scenarios called specs.<ref>rpsce-rails on GitHub</ref>

capybara

Capybara helps you test web applications by simulating how a real user would interact with your application. It comes with built in Rack::Test and Selenium support. WebKit is supported through an external gem.<ref>capybara on GitHub</ref> To control the environments in which the scenarios are run, it provides before and after hooks.<ref>Before and after hooks</ref>

• before(:each) blocks are run before each scenario in the group
• before(:all) blocks are run once before all of the scenarios in the group
• after(:each) blocks are run after each scenario in the group
• after(:all) blocks are run once after all of the scenarios in the group

Test Scenarios

Based on the steps involved in manual submission of the assignment, the following test scenarios are considered:

Scenario to check whether student is able to login

Login with student13 and password

Click on Sign In button

Updated page should have text content Assignment

Scenario to check whether student is able to submit valid link to an ongoing assignment

Login with student13 and password

Click on Sign In button

Click on OnGoing Assignment

Click on Your work

Upload link http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/efg/517/f15/schedule

Updated page should have link http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/efg/517/f15/schedule

Scenario to check whether student is not able submit invalid link to an ongoing assignment

Login with student13 and password

Click on Sign In button

Click on OnGoing Assignment

Click on Your work

Upload link http://

Updated page should display flash message with text URI is not valid

Scenario to check whether student is able to upload a file to an ongoing assignment

Login with student13 and password

Click on Sign In button

Click on OnGoing Assignment

Click on Your work

Upload file student_submission_spec.rb

Updated page should contain filename student_submission_spec.rb

Scenario to check whether student is able to upload valid link and a file to an ongoing assignment

Login with student13 and password

Click on Sign In button

Click on OnGoing Assignment

Click on Your work

Upload link http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/efg/517/f15/assignments

Upload file users_spec.rb

Updated page should have link http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/efg/517/f15/assignments

Updated page should contain filename users_spec.rb

Scenario to check whether student is not able submit valid link to a finished assignment

Login with student13 and password

Click on Sign In button

Click on Finished Assignment

Click on Your work

Page should not have Upload link button

Scenario to check whether student is able upload file to a finished assignment

Login with student13 and password

Click on Sign In button

Click on Finished Assignment

Click on Your work

Upload file student_submission_spec.rb

Updated page should contain filename student_submission_spec.rb

Code

Code for the feature test consist in two files:

• assignment_setup.rb which contains method for creating assignments using controller calls.
• student_assignment_submission.rb which contain calls to assignment_setup, scenarios to test assignment submission and commands to delete the created assignments.

Structure

require files

RSpec.feature 'assignment submission when student' do

before(:all) do

create assignments for submission

end

before(:each) do

capybara steps to login

end

after(:all) do

delete assignments created

end

scenario 'submits only valid link to ongoing assignment' do

mock steps using capybara

make assertions

end

....

....

....

end

Sample Scenario

require 'rails_helper'
require 'spec_helper'
require 'assignment_setup'

RSpec.feature 'assignment submission when student' do

  active_assignment="FeatureTest"
  expired_assignment="LibraryRailsApp"
  d = Date.parse(Time.now.to_s)
  due_date1=(d >> 1).strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:00")
  due_date2=(d << 1).strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:00")

  # Before all block runs once before all the scenarios are tested
  before(:all) do
    # Create active/ongoing assignment
    create_assignment(active_assignment, due_date1)

    # Create expired/finished assignment
    create_assignment(expired_assignment, due_date2)
  end

  # Before each block runs before every scenario
  before(:each) do
    # Login as a student before each scenario
    visit root_path
    fill_in 'User Name', :with => 'student13'
    fill_in 'Password', :with => 'password'
    click_on 'SIGN IN'
  end

  # After all block runs after all the scenarios are tested
  after(:all)do
    # Delete active/ongoing assignment created by the test
    assignment = Assignment.find_by_name(active_assignment)
    assignment.delete

    # Delete expired/finished assignment created by the test
    assignment = Assignment.find_by_name(expired_assignment)
    assignment.delete
  end

  # Scenario to check whether student is able to submit valid link to an ongoing assignment
  scenario 'submits only valid link to ongoing assignment' do
    click_on active_assignment
    click_on 'Your work'
    fill_in 'submission', :with => 'http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/efg/517/f15/schedule'
    click_on 'Upload link'
    expect(page).to have_content 'http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/efg/517/f15/schedule'
  end

end

Running the tests

The following are steps required to run the test

• Clone the repository in a new directory

$ mkdir review
$ cd review
$ git clone https://github.com/shrenujgandhi/expertiza.git

In case you don't have a database with student and instructor entries then download the dump from https://drive.google.com/a/ncsu.edu/file/d/0B2vDvVjH76uESEkzSWpJRnhGbmc/view. Extract its contents.

$ cd expertiza
$ rake db:create:all
$ cd Downloads/
$ mysql -u root -p expertiza_development < expertiza_scrubbed_2015_08_14.sql
password:

$ cd expertiza
$ rake db:migrate

• Type the command to run tests for assignment submission

rspec spec/features/student_submission_spec.rb 

Test Results

The following screenshot shows the result of the rspec command.

Test Analysis

• 7 examples, 0 failures imply that there are 7 test scenarios and none of them failed.
• The tests take around 35 seconds to run, which implies that they are fast.
• They are also repeatable as the assignments that are created in the before all block are also deleted in the after all block.
• They are also self-verifying as all the results are in green, which mean that all the cases passed.

Existing Bugs

During the course of our testing, we encountered two potential bugs in the Expertiza system. These are:

1. A student can upload file even after the assignment is finished.
2. A student can upload an .exe file to any assignment.

The following screenshots show these bugs on the current version of Expertiza used by the batch of Fall 2015.

Figure: This screenshot shows the list of assignments along with their current stage in Expertiza.

Figure: This screenshot shows that a student can select a file in a finished assignment in Expertiza.

Figure: This screenshot shows that a student can upload a file in a finished assignment in Expertiza.

Figure: This screenshot shows that a student can select an .exe file in any assignment in Expertiza.

Figure: This screenshot shows that a student can upload an .exe file in any assignment in Expertiza.

Future Work

• To prevent students from uploading a file to a finished assignment, like the upload link button, remove the upload file button.
• Executable files can sometimes be a part of the assignment. To there needs to be a check while creating the assignment whether .exe files are allowed or not.
• To run the test on test database using factories and fixtures, so that the tests are completely independent.

Project Resources

1. GitHub Link
2. YouTube Demo

References

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External links

• Expertiza Documentation