CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2020 - E2076. Allow users to create an account and submit work to an "assignment" (e.g., for conference reviewing)

This page provides a description of the Expertiza based OSS project.

About Expertiza

Expertiza is an open source project based on Ruby on Rails framework. Expertiza allows the instructor to create new assignments and customize new or existing assignments. It also allows the instructor to create a list of topics the students can sign up for. Students can form teams in Expertiza to work on various projects and assignments. Students can also peer review other students' submissions. Expertiza supports submission across various document types, including the URLs and wiki pages.

Problem Statement

Peer-assessment systems have always been separate from peer-review systems used by journals and conferences. But the two systems have a lot in common: submitting and reviewing, and guidance given to reviewers in the form of a rubric. The main differences are how accounts are created and how reviewers are assigned. In a peer-assessment system, the instructor typically creates accounts for the whole class. Reviewers are assigned either by the instructor, or automatically by the system. In conference and journal review, anyone can submit a paper. When they do, an account is implicitly created for them. They may invite their co-authors to join them; this is kind of like inviting teammates in Expertiza, except that the co-authors don’t necessarily have pre-existing accounts either, and there is typically no maximum on the number of authors for a paper.

Proposed Solution

• Created a new controller, conference_controller.rb to manage the conference related assignments. A link is generated which can be used by the user to sign up to the conference page. Furthermore, you can find a Captcha implementation which is used to verify that a legitimate user is trying to create an account. This would help maintain the integrity of the website, preventing the use of automated bots on the website.

• Added the feature, invitations which can be sent out by the author of the conference paper to have more co-authors for the paper.

• We used the conference_helper.rb to interconnect different modules inside Expertiza. Refactored the previous solution following proper design practices and ensured proper naming conventions are followed.

• Ensured that new users who are not current users in the Expertiza website can sign up and join a conference assignment. Also, the current users of the Expertiza website can also sign up in the conference assignment using the invite.

Design Plan

Use Case

1. Author signs up: This use case assumes that the author isn't part of our expertiza database yet and wants to submit a paper for review. Assuming that the author already has the link to sign up for expertiza. The author would then have to click the link and will have to go through a captcha to verify the user identity. Then he/she will be asked to put some details to create account with role as student. After account creation, Author will receive email with login ID and password.
2. Author submits paper to expertiza for review: Now that the author has an account he can login to his expertiza account and then click the assignment. Then the author will have to upload his paper by clicking submit your work, then adding the details of the paper like track of the paper etc. [planning to have a dropdown list for this].
3. Author sends an invitation to collaborators: If required, the author can keep adding collaborators/contributors by selecting the paper he/she uploaded and selecting add contributors. Then he/she has to fill in the co-authors details like email id, etc.
4. Collaborator signs up: Assuming that the collaborator doesnt have an existing account. They would have received a mail when they were added as collaborator, they can login using the given username and password in that mail. Then after log in he/she can click your team and accept the pending author invite.
5. Review: This part will be almost similar to existing peer reviews.

Source: CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2019 -E1974 Allow users to create an account and submit work to an ”assignment” Design

Links

• Git - https://github.com/snkumar32/expertiza
• Pull request - Coming Soon...
• Video - Coming Soon...

Files to be edited

These are some of the files identified, that will require changes. Also, our observations include that most of the code has been written in the controller which is not an ideal design. We will try and push some of the code into models to better align with the design principles.

1. users_controller.rb :

Previous Methods added:
1. create_writer : for implementing the sign-up for a writer
2. new_writer : creates an instance of user class 

Current proposed changes :
1. There is some repeatable code. We are planning to restructure it in such a way that it follows 'DRY' guidelines. 
2. We are planning to optimize the code by eliminating unused variables. 

2. assignments_controller.rb

Methods to be edited:
1. addContributor : for adding co-authors to already submitted papers
2. updateAttributes : for updating the attributes of the submitted paper
3. addReviewDetails : to control the number of reviews, etc. for a given paper

3. invitations_controller.rb

Methods to be edited:
1. check_participant_before_invitation : This method checks if the user is part of an assignment that is of 'conference' type.

Finally, we have to update the corresponding views like : assignment.html.erb and user.html.erb

Test Plan

Please find the below plan to test the functionality

RSpec Tests

Please find below RSpec Test cases for this feature

spec/controllers/invitations_controller_spec.rb

This spec would test the following scenarios when an author is inviting co-authors to join his/her team

1) When the co-author does not have an expertiza account: It is expected that invitation creation should increase the User count by one and Invitations count by one

2) When the co-author already has an expertiza account: It is expected that invitation creation should increase only the Invitations count by one as user is already existing

3) When email entered by the author is in wrong format and co-author does not exist already: It is expected that no new invitation should be created.

4) (Regression) for a normal assignment, if author tries to add a teammate who does not have an expertiza account It is expected that no new invitation or user should be created.

spec/controllers/users_controller_spec.rb

This spec would test the following scenarios when an author is joining the conference assignment as a participant

1) When the author does not have an expertiza account: It is expected that User count should be increased by one and participants count should increase by one

2) When the author already has an expertiza account but is logged out: It is expected that only participants count should increase by one

3) When the author already has an expertiza account and is logged in: It is expected that only participants count should increase by one

Team Information

• Sneha Kumar(skumar32)
• Palash Gupta(pgupta25)
• Sushreeta Mitra(smitra4)
• Amol Gautam(agautam6)

References

Previous work: [1] [2]

Pull Request: Coming soon...