CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2013/oss ssp

OSS E803 Refactoring and testing — signup_sheet model

Motivation

The motivation of this project was to provide functionality to manage Sign Up Sheets. The intent was to improve the design of the project by modularizing the code and maintaining good naming conventions. The methods relevant to wait-listing a team were all a part of the Sign Up sheet model and controller. in order to improve the readability of the code and to have a better organization, we intended to move these methods to a separate Waitlist Model. Also, some methods had too many functionalities, a lot more than what their names suggested. To have a more elegant code, the functionalities had to be moved to relevant methods. cancel_all_waitlists and waitlist_teams methods were created in the waitlist model for this purpose. Naming conventions are considered very important for making the code more readable and understandable. Ruby is known for its 'Convention over Configuration' ideology. Thus the naming conventions had to be taken care of. In the Sign Up sheet controller, we could see the usage of Camel cases in a lot of places. We intended to replace these by the convention of Ruby where underscore is used between two words in variable names with all the alphabets in small letters.

Future Work

The sign up sheet controller still has many methods relevant to other entities which need to be moved to other relevant models and controllers. save_topic_dependancies and save_topic_deadlines are two methods which can be put into SignUpTopic Model or controller. show_team method which is in sign_up_sheet controller can be moved to teams_controller. We also see another controller called SignUp controller which looks like a redundant one which has methods mostly from SignUpSheet controller. And these methods don't seem to be used. So this method can be looked into carefully and discarded if possible. There is also a function called slotAvailable? in the sign up sheet controller which merely makes a call to a method slotAvailable? in the SignUpTopic model and does nothing else. This looks like an unnecesary redirection. Dependencies can be resolved and this method can be removed and calls can directly be made to the slotAvailable? method in the SignUpTopic model. Also the method update_waitlisted_users can be moved from SignUpTopic model to Wailist Model to improve the readability of the code.