CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2019 - E1956. There is no shortcut to get free review points: Review Assignment Bug

E1956. There is no shortcut to get free review points: Review Assignment Bug

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.

Introduction

Problem Statement

E1956. There is no shortcut to get free review points: Review Assignment Bug

Background

Each assignment contains an assignment policy. We can generally submit n reviews according to assignment policy. For an assignment with topics, a student has an option to choose a submission to review or can say “I don’t care” and the system chooses any available topic for review.

Motivation

This project in particular intends that the students collaborate with each other and work on making enhancements to the code base by applying the concepts of Rails,RSpec, DRY code,Test driven development etc. This provides an opportunity for students to contribute to an open source project and learn further about software deployment etc.

Currently there is no check in the backend that limits the number of reviews a student can be assigned. Students can get more peer reviews than assignment policy.

Proposed Changes

• The assign_review_dynamically method was previously not keeping a track of the number of assignments reviewed by a student.

The code, in order to assign reviews in a dynamic fashion has been implemented in the review_mappings_controller.rb. The method assign_review_dynamically, checks initially if a student has selected a topic for which he wants a review or if the "I don't care" option is selected. Based on the selection the method would then select a submission which is

1. Not assigned previously to given student

2. Is not his own submission

However, since the code did not have a check for how many reviews already are allocated to a given student, one could easily bypass the review limit by sending the same post request again and again.

• The assign_review_dynamically method also does not keep a check on the number of outstanding submissions that a student can have at any time. The code for the same has been implemented in the review_mappings_controller.rb where the user would be allowed to request for a new submission depending on the value returned by the check_outstanding_reviews method.

ReviewResponseMap:

Creates a mapping from the student to assigned submission for reviewing as soon as assign_review_dynamically assigns a submission to student for review.

We decided to get all the reviews assigned to given student from ReviewResponseMap (where(reviewer_id: reviewer.id)) and then check if the size of the reviews assigned to the given reviewer is more than the maximum value allocated for the assignment and creates a flash error if the maximum review limit is exceded.

List of Changes

Issues Presented

• The number of reviews done by any student is not checked in the back-end with the maximum number of submissions allowed as per the assignment policy.
• There is no check to see if the submission is already assigned to the student.
• There is no check on the number of outstanding reviews a user can have.

Current Implementation

• No limitation on maximum number of peer reviews.

There is no check in the backend that limits the number of reviews a student can be assigned. There is a check in the UI, but you could evade the limit by typing in a URL to make the same post request. You can also evade it by clicking multiple times on "Request a review for submission" button in UI.

• There is no check to see if the submission is already assigned to the student (on consulting the TA, it was made known that the feature was working correctly without editing any of the code and thus no refactoring was performed for this task).
• If the same request is re-sent, the system adds the same submission for review a second time.
• There is no check on the number of outstanding reviews that a user can have at any time.

Proposed Implementation

Files modified

review_mapping_controller_spec.rb

• Change has been done in the implementation of review_mapping_controller.rb where new check was added. This check fetches number of reviews done by the student currently from ReviewResponseMap table. To adapt to those changes two new mocks were added to review_mapping_controller_spec.rb.
• ReviewResponseMap is mocked to return 0. This is the number of reviews that a student has done so far.
• Assignment is mocked to return 1 as number of reviews allowed for the assignment.

context 'when assignment has topics and a topic is selected by reviewer' do
      it 'assigns reviewer dynamically and redirects to student_review#list page' do
        allow(assignment).to receive(:topics?).and_return(true)
        topic = double('SignUpTopic')
        allow(SignUpTopic).to receive(:find).with('1').and_return(topic)
        allow(assignment).to receive(:assign_reviewer_dynamically).with(participant, topic).and_return(true)
        allow(ReviewResponseMap).to receive(:reviewer_id).with(1).and_return(0)
	allow(assignment).to receive(:num_reviews_allowed).and_return(1)
	params = {
          assignment_id: 1,
          reviewer_id: 1,
          topic_id: 1
        }
        post :assign_reviewer_dynamically, params
        expect(response).to redirect_to '/student_review/list?id=1'
      end
    end

    context 'when assignment does not have topics' do
      it 'runs another algorithms and redirects to student_review#list page' do
        allow(assignment).to receive(:topics?).and_return(false)
        team1 = double('AssignmentTeam')
        team2 = double('AssignmentTeam')
        teams = [team1, team2]
        allow(assignment).to receive(:candidate_assignment_teams_to_review).with(participant).and_return(teams)
        allow(teams).to receive_message_chain(:to_a, :sample).and_return(team2)
        allow(assignment).to receive(:assign_reviewer_dynamically_no_topic).with(participant, team2).and_return(true)
        allow(ReviewResponseMap).to receive(:reviewer_id).with(1).and_return(0)
        allow(assignment).to receive(:num_reviews_allowed).and_return(1)
	params = {
          assignment_id: 1,
          reviewer_id: 1,
          topic_id: 1
        }
        post :assign_reviewer_dynamically, params
        expect(response).to redirect_to '/student_review/list?id=1'
      end
    end
  end

review_mapping_controller.rb

• A new check was added to find the number of reviews done by the student. Whenever a student ask for review, a new entry is done in the ReviewResponseMap table in the database.
• The code here checks the number of reviews assigned to the student and then compares it with the maximum number of reviews allowed as per assignment policy. If the student is asking for more reviews than the assignment policy then a flash notice is sent to the student.
• Also there is a check on the number of outstanding assignment reviews a user can have at a time. The check_outstanding_review keeps a count of the number of reviews in progress as well as the number of reviews currently completed by the user and returns a Boolean value depending upon whether the former is less than the maximum outstanding reviews allowed as per the assignment policy or not. The user can only request for a submission if the check_outstanding_review returns True.

def assign_reviewer_dynamically
    assignment = Assignment.find(params[:assignment_id])
    reviewer = AssignmentParticipant.where(user_id: params[:reviewer_id], parent_id: assignment.id).first 

    if params[:i_dont_care].nil? && params[:topic_id].nil? && assignment.topics? && assignment.can_choose_topic_to_review?
      flash[:error] = "No topic is selected.  Please go back and select a topic."
    else
      if is_review_allowed?(assignment, reviewer)
        if check_outstanding_reviews?(assignment, reviewer)
          # begin
          if assignment.topics? # assignment with topics
            topic = if params[:topic_id]
                      SignUpTopic.find(params[:topic_id])
                    else
                      assignment.candidate_topics_to_review(reviewer).to_a.sample rescue nil
                    end
            if topic.nil?
              flash[:error] = "No topics are available to review at this time. Please try later."
            else
              assignment.assign_reviewer_dynamically(reviewer, topic)
            end

          else # assignment without topic -Yang
            assignment_teams = assignment.candidate_assignment_teams_to_review(reviewer)
            assignment_team = assignment_teams.to_a.sample rescue nil
            if assignment_team.nil?
              flash[:error] = "No artifacts are available to review at this time. Please try later."
            else
              assignment.assign_reviewer_dynamically_no_topic(reviewer, assignment_team)
            end
          end
        end
      else
        flash[:notice] = "You cannot do more than " + assignment.num_reviews_allowed.to_s + " reviews based on assignment policy"
      end
      end
    redirect_to controller: 'student_review', action: 'list', id: reviewer.id
  end
      
  def is_review_allowed?(assignment, reviewer)
    @review_mappings = ReviewResponseMap.where(reviewer_id: reviewer.id, reviewed_object_id:  assignment.id)
    assignment.num_reviews_allowed > @review_mappings.size
  end

  def check_outstanding_reviews?(assignment, reviewer)
    @review_mappings = ReviewResponseMap.where(reviewer_id: reviewer.id, reviewed_object_id: assignment.id)
    @num_reviews_total = @review_mappings.size
    if @num_reviews_total == 0
      true
    else
      @num_reviews_completed = 0
      @review_mappings.each do |map|
        @num_reviews_completed += 1 if !map.response.empty? && map.response.last.is_submitted
      end
      @num_reviews_in_progress = @num_reviews_total - @num_reviews_completed
      @num_reviews_in_progress < Assignment.max_outstanding_reviews
    end
  end

Test Plan

For users intending to view the deployed Expertiza associated with this assignment, the credentials are below: Instructor Login: username -> instructor6, password -> password

Testing from UI

Use the given link: http://152.46.19.135:8080/

Follow the instructions below to test the implemented changes:
1. Login as instructor.
2. Go to Manage->Assignments and navigate to assignment name 'test1'.
3. Click on add participants. This will give a list of all participants.
4. Now click on any student username in order to impersonate.
5. Go to test1->other's_work and click on request submission button continuously and wait for the response.
6. It would be noted that the request would never exceed the number of submissions mentioned in the assignment policy.

Code Coverage

22.581%

Team Information

Dhruvil Shah

Neel Parikh

Steve Menezes

Mentor: Suraj Siddharudh

References

1.Expertiza on GitHub

2.GitHub Project Repository Fork

3.Live Expertiza website

4.Demo Link

5.Project documentation wiki

6.Rspec Documentation