CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2013/OSS E600

OSS E600

Writing Assignment 2

Work in progress. Due 3/20/2013

Introduction

There were three goals in the OSS E600 project <ref name='assignment'> http://courses.ncsu.edu/csc517/common/homework/OSS/expertiza.html</ref>

1. Restructure the feature files for better organization. Feature folders like 'student' had few scenarios strung out between many files. Reconsolidate the files to make them more useful.
2. Determine a gem that will generate code coverage reports. It needs to work with Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.
3. Use the coverage tool to find areas that need the most improvement. Then create new tests targeting those areas to increase coverage.

Setup

Setting up the coverage + cucumber environment is very similar to setting up for only cucumber. The majority of the instructions in the old cucumber wiki still apply.<ref name='old_wiki'>http://wiki.expertiza.ncsu.edu/index.php?title=Using_Cucumber_with_Expertiza</ref> Our instructions are as follows:

gem install relevance-rcov
bundle install
rake db:create
rake db:test:prepare

Modify the file ./lib/task/cucumber.rake. Add line "t.rcov=true" below each of the three t.profile lines.

    Cucumber::Rake::Task.new({:ok => 'db:test:prepare'}, 'Run features that should pass') do |t|
      t.binary = vendored_cucumber_bin # If nil, the gem's binary is used.
      t.fork = true # You may get faster startup if you set this to false
      t.profile = 'default'
      t.rocv = true #add this line for coverage report
    end

    Cucumber::Rake::Task.new({:wip => 'db:test:prepare'}, 'Run features that are being worked on') do |t|
      t.binary = vendored_cucumber_bin
      t.fork = true # You may get faster startup if you set this to false
      t.profile = 'wip'
      t.rocv = true #add this line for coverage report
    end

    Cucumber::Rake::Task.new({:rerun => 'db:test:prepare'}, 'Record failing features and run only them if any exist') do |t|
      t.binary = vendored_cucumber_bin
      t.fork = true # You may get faster startup if you set this to false
      t.profile = 'rerun'
      t.rocv = true #add this line for coverage report
    end

Design Patterns

The work that we did in implementing this project did not introduce any new design patterns to the Expertiza system that were of our own creation.

The Cucumber system, however, does exhibit the Facade Pattern. The Facade Pattern provides a simplified interface to a software system. The Cucumber package provides this facade through the steps in Capybara. The simplified interface allows the software developer to write tests in something close to a natural language.

References

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