CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2016/oss E1639

This wiki page describes changes made under E1639 OSS project assignment for Fall 2016, CSC/ECE 517.

Expertiza Background

Expertiza is a web application for educational purposes. It is an open source project based on Ruby on Rails framework. Expertiza has been created and maintained by faculty and students of NCSU. It helps teachers set up assignments for students who can then make submissions. Students can also review work of other students and give feedback to help incorporate improvements.

Project Description

The following OSS project deals mainly with the ResponseController. The goal of this project is make the code more readable, maintainable and to improve elegance of the code. We would like ResponseController to adhere to the DRY principle. It focuses on refactoring some of the more complex methods and removing some redundant code. At present, ResponseController has methods that would better be located in other controllers. The project relocates such methods to its appropriate Controller class.

Files modified

Following files were mainly modified for this project namely:
1. response_controller.rb
2. response_controller_spec.rb
3. review_mapping_controller.rb
4. review_mapping_controller_spec.rb
5. routes.rb
6. _reviews.html.erb
7. _scores_submitted_work.html.erb
8. _self_review.html.erb

ResponseController

Response controller manages the responses entered by users. When a user fills out any kind of rubric (review rubrics,author-feedback rubrics,teammate-review rubrics,quizzes,surveys), a response is generated. Responses come in different versions. Any time an author revises his/her work, and the reviewer reviews it again, a separate Response object is generated.Each Response object points to a particular ResponseMap, which provides details about reviewer, reviewee and reviewed entity.

What needs to be done

1) Refactor the update method -to improve the functionality of checking the @map type.
2) Refactor the saving method -to improve the case handling of selfReviewResponseMap
3) Move new_feedback method from ResponseController to ReviewMappingController - ResponseController should only handle one kind of object
4) Modified functional tests for new_feedback method

Solutions Implemented and Delivered

• Refactor the update method
  

Update method is called when any kind of response is edited by the user. This method was very long and hard to read. It was checking the type of @map and performing various operations based on it using long if..elseif..else ladder. We implemented a function call to perform the type check operation, thus simplified the update method

• Refactor the saving method
  

Saving method is called to save the response when user edits any particular response or creates one. It was assigning params[:returs] to 'selfview' if the @map type is selfReponseMap. This params[:return] value was then further used in redirection method to handle the selfReviewResponseMap separately. We removed the assignment params[:return]= "selfreview" from save method. Rather we are directly passing the :return parameter value from edit and new methods of _self_review.html.erb, a view of SubmittedContent controller which handles the selfReview functionality.

• Move new_feedback method from ResponseController to ReviewMappingController
  

new_feedback method is called when a user provides author feedback for any review. It was defined in the ResponseController earlier. We moved the method to ReviewMappingController since ResponseController should only handle Response object, while new_feedback is dealing with feedbackResponseMap object.

• Modified functional tests for new_feedback method
  

We modified the test cases to accommodate changes of the new_feedback method and created new rspec file review_mapping_controller_rspec.rb

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.