During the summer, I dedicated my efforts to a range of tasks for Submitty, including the development of new features, bug fixes, and code refactoring.

RainbowGrades

Border-outline

• One of the most noticeable change made in RainbowGrades this summer
• Designed to indicate the status of individual gradeables
• Implemented primary for instructors to discern status within large table

Git version

• Displays RainbowGrades version based on user’s local repository
• Offers insight into potential discrepancies between the main and local version
• Facilitates developers to trace issues when users patch their local RainbowGrades

Course Section ID (Course Registration Number)

• Retrieves relevant data for each student from the database and renders it into individual report JSON files

iClicker Removal

• iClicker was tool to assist students to participate in class replaced by Submini poll
• Meticulously removed obsolete iClicker code from codebase

Future Works

• Add version conflict status for border-outline
• Redirect compilation output to a log file
• Introduce Continuous Integration (CI) for RainbowGrades
• Apply CSS enhancements to minimize repetitive HTML code
• Refactoring the table to enable dynamical sorting, row hiding, and related improvements

Web-based customization

Plagiarism Entries

• Instructors are now able to input plagiarism data through the web GUI
• Eliminates the need for manual editing of the customization.json file
• Web has invalid entry check, for instance, duplicate entries which has advantage over editing json file directly
• The web interface includes validation checks, such as preventing duplicates, offering an advantage over direct JSON file editing.

Display Options

• Instructors can now choose the information to display using the web GUI
• Eliminates the need for manual editing of the customization.json file
• Description of each display option elegantly collapses with CSS updates.

Future Works

• Switch to seamless and simultaneous saving change from manually pressing Save Change button.
• Enhance error handling, such as catching compilation errors and permission issues

Submitty_test script

Submitty test

• A newly introduced command, similar to “submitty_install_site,” runs PHP static analysis/code sniffer into a single command
• Simplify the local PHP linting process by eliminating the need to remember lengthy command lines or copy them from the website.
• This script originally started as a personal tool for myself but evolved into a valuable resource for many developers
• The decision to run it within Vagrant, despite the slower execution compared to host machines, was driven by the need for maintainability and cross-platform compatibility, prioritizing these aspects over runtime efficiency.

Future Works

• Expand by adding JavaScript, CSS, Python linting, and Unit tests
• Ultimately, the goal is to empower developers to run most CI processes locally, reducing GitHub CI load

Database Queries

Grading Stats

• The grading stats page now features the count of unresolved inquiries assigned to each grader
• Offer instructors to efficiently monitor and prompt the respective grader to complete their grading tasks

Future Works

• Enhance the visual analysis and interpretation of the statistics
• Provide user-friendly tools to manipulate the statistics