CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2024 - E2456. Refactor teams user.rb

Expertiza

Expertiza is a web application through which students can submit and peer-review learning objects (articles, code, web sites, etc). The National Science Foundation supports the Expertiza project. It is used in select courses at NC State and by professors at several other colleges and universities.

[Expertiza](http://expertiza.ncsu.edu/) is a [Ruby on Rails](http://rubyonrails.org/) based open source project.

Problem Statement

The TeamsUser class in the Expertiza repository serves as a join model between the Team and Participant classes, establishing a many-to-many relationship. Its primary purpose is to manage team memberships within the context of assignments or courses, facilitating functionalities such as retrieving a user's name, deleting users or teams, and managing participant associations.

The primary issue with the TeamsUser class is that it associates teams directly with users rather than with participants. In the context of the application, participants are users who are specifically associated with an assignment or a course. Since teams are formed within the scope of assignments or courses, handling team memberships through participants is more appropriate. Almost everywhere else, an assignment uses Participant objects rather than User objects. The exception is when it comes to Teams. It would simplify the design to use TeamsParticipants instead of TeamsUsers.

Background

The main role of teams_user class is to handle functionalities that deal with a team associated with an assignment/course and the participants (users associated with a course/assignment) in the team. The functionalities include retrieving a user’s name, deleting a user from the team, deleting the team if no participants are left in the team, adding a member to the team, finding the team ID for a user with a specific assignment, etc. Overall, it encapsulates the logic required to manage participants’ in teams within the context of assignments/courses in Expertiza.

Refactor

The refactoring process involved careful analysis of existing methods, removal of redundancies, and restructuring code to maintain clarity and efficiency. Significant focus was placed on simplifying method names, enhancing documentation, and aligning with object-oriented principles.

The refactor aims to address the inappropriate association of teams directly with users rather than participants, ensuring consistency with the application's architecture. The changes involve:

• Renaming TeamsUser to TeamsParticipant.
• Updating associations and references in related models: Team, User, and Participant.
• Removing empty or unnecessary methods and renaming others for clarity.
• Reducing the code and conditional complexity of the model
• Identifying code smells and refactoring for efficiency.
• Writing tests for all of the methods.
• Ensuring adherence to SOLID and DRY principles.

Files Modified

Changed files in Model:

Changes to app/models/teams_user.rb

#	Change	Rationale	Commit Link
1	Renamed TeamsUser to TeamsParticipant	Aligns with application logic that utilizes Participants rather than Users.	Commit
2	Updated associations to reference Participants	Ensures consistency across the application and correctness in related models for foreign key relations.	Commit
3	Removed get_team_members from teams_participant model	The method was empty without any logic so it was just a placeholder method without any usage across the project.	Commit
4	Renamed methods: remove_team_if_participants_empty, remove_team_participant, first_participant_for_team, add_accepted_invitee_to_team, find_team_id for clarity	Improves code readability for new programmers.	Commit
5	Refactored methods: add_accepted_invitee_to_team, and find_team_id for efficiency and reducing complexity	To reduce Cognitive Complexity and making the model more maintainable and efficient	Commit

Next Steps

We are yet to discuss the scope of this project and whether it can be extended to other functionalities in Expertiza.

Team

Mentor

• Jayesh, Kiron

Members

• Agarwal, Arjit
• Manbhekar, Pranav
• Singhania, Chinmay

References

1. ["Expertiza"](https://expertiza.ncsu.edu/)
2. ["OSS Projects on Expertiza"](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fB9nHsop_yptjcj3CFn80BcZjXcSDbzcWwKvBDUTVrQ/edit?tab=t.0)
3. ["Github"](https://github.com/expertiza/expertiza)
4. ["Expertiza VCL Server"](http://)