CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2019 - E1944. Refactor review mapping controller

This wiki page is for the description of changes made under E1944 OSS assignment for Fall 2019, CSC/ECE 517.

Expertiza Background

Expertiza is an educational web application created and maintained by the joint efforts of the students and the faculty at NC State University. It’s an open-source project developed on Ruby on Rails platform and its codebase is available on Github. It facilitates peer review among the students allowing them to improve their work from the feedback. It also assists the faculty in customizing the specifications for the projects and Assignments.

Description of the current project

The following is an Expertiza based OSS project which deals primarily with a controller namely review_mapping_controller.rb. It focusses on refactoring some of the more complex methods, modifying some of the language to make it more Ruby friendly, removing redundant code etc among the other things. The goal of this project is to attempt to make this part of the application easier to read and maintain.

Files modified in the current project

A controller and a helper file were modified for this project namely:
1. review_mapping_controller.rb
2. review_mapping_controller_spec.rb
3. assign_quiz_controller.rb
4. assign_quiz_controller_spec.rb
5. review_response_map_controller.rb
6. review_response_map_controller_spec.rb
7. routes.rb
8. Other views & partials associated affected by these changes

ReviewMappingController

This controller will map the submissions made by the teams to the students for facilitating peer-reviewing. A couple of long and complex methods such as peer_review_strategy and automatic_review_mapping were refactored from this controller along with the removal of some non-related methods such as add_calibration and assign_quiz_dynamically. Variable names have been changed and code has been modularized and helper methods were separated from the important methods into a module and were included in the class.

Test Cases were created for the newly created controllers such as assign_quiz_controller etc.

review_mapping_controller_spec.rb

Tests were removed from this file which belongs to the isolated methods.

AssignQuizController

Assigning Quizzes (Quizzes are also stored in the Assignment table) is not a seemingly/semantically related task to review mapping. Hence this was moved into a separate controller.

assign_quiz_controller_spec.rb

Tests related to assign_quiz_controller were moved into this file.

ReviewResponseMapController.rb

Add Calibration is a nuanced method that has seemingly different functionality than Review Mapping Controller and hence moved into a separate controller.

review_response_map_controller_spec.rb

Tests related to review_response_map were moved into this file.

routes.rb

New routes were added to newly created controllers.

views/partials

Routes were changed in the views and partials.

Details of changes

1. Changed 'instructor = build(:instructor)' ‘@instructor = build(:instructor, id: 1)’ it was being called in first three test cases and in above loop too.
2. Changed params[:i_dont_care] to params[:no_particular_topic]
3. Removed cascading effects of above change from features (CSS)
4. Created a variable named ‘allowed_actions’ in method choose_case(action_in_params) 5. Refactored Peer_review_strategy by using a helper method gen_random_participant_id 6. Refactored automatic_review_mapping by using a helper method check_num_reviews_args 7. Modularized helper methods (which are not accessed by any other functionality outside the review_mapping_controller) into a module and was mixed in the ReviewMappingController Class. 8. Abided to the principles of Magic Tricks of testing specified in wand did not test any internally used methods, The other tests are written were already following this principle. 9. Isolated AssignQuizDynamically method into a separate controller as the functionality was not related to ReviewMappingController. 10. Associated Specs/routes/views/partials have been modified to adapt the change in controllers.