CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2018/E1814 Write unit tests for collusion cycle.rb
Introduction
Background
Expertiza is an open source project that can be used by instructors to create assignments and assign them to students. Students can manage teams for the assignment and submit work for each of the assignments. After the students have submitted their work they can review other student's work to facilitate grading. The project is based on the Ruby on Rails framework.
Motivation
Achieving good coverage with quality tests is part of a good development process. The collusion_cycle.rb class is used to calculate the grade received based on the reviews from other students as well as handle cases where the reviewer is also reviewed by the reviewee effectively creating a cycle. We want to test this class to achieve good coverage in order to catch possible bugs in the program and ensure that it works correctly.
Tasks Identified
- Test Two Node Cycle
- Test Three Node Cycle
- Test Four Node Cycle
- Test Cycle Similarity Score
- Test Cycle Deviation Score
Classes
app/models/collusion_cycle.rb
spec/models/collusion_cycle_spec.rb
Writing the collusion Cycle Tests
To start the test file we created sample data through FactoryBot to aid testing through each of the tasks we identified. To test each of the Node Cycle tests we created a context for each of the possible branches in a node cycle to ensure that we tested all branches thoroughly. To test the Cycle Similarity Score and Cycle Deviation Score we will again create sample data and pass it to each of the functions to make sure we get the appropriate grade from the collusion of each of the reviewers.
Changes To the View
None
Impact Analysis
Currently, we have already found one bug, which was a missing parameter in the collusion_cycle.rb file with each of the node_cycle methods (two_node_cycle, three_node_cycle, four_node_cycle) which needed an assignmentparticipant parameter to be passed in for the function to even work. In addition the obvious benefit of adding more coverage you a better assurance that the code works well. Of course testing does not guarantee that the code works, but can only be used to find where the code does not work.
Running the Test Files
To run the test files you need to clone the repository in an Expertiza environment Expertiza Github