Legacy Code: Organic

Organic is a webapp that, when complete, will offer a replacement for the app https://ucsb-cs-github-linker.herokuapp.com. The purpose of the app is to help instructors manage Github Organizations that are being used for programming and software development courses (whether individual assignments, or group assignments.)

The former app provided many functions, but the following is the MVP:

• Login via Github OAuth for admins, instructors and students
• Admins can designate roles for users (admin, instructor, student)
• Instructors can create courses in the app, and associate each course with a github organization
• Instructors can upload a course roster for a course that associates an email address and student id with each student.
• Students can login and see a list of courses in progress. They can click to join the course; if any of the emails associated with their Github account matches the email on the course roster, an invitation to the Github organization will be automatically generated. They will be presented a link to that invitation which they can then accept.
• Once students have completed this procedure, instructors will be able to access a .csv file that associates students name, id, and email with their github id.

Future functionality for Organic (beyond MVP) that mirrors functions already present in the previous app:

• Instructors can create repos for individual assignments with a consistent naming convention
• Instructors can automatically create teams in Github from a CSV, and/or sync Organic’s data on team membership from the teams on Github (two-way sync)
• Instructors can create repos for team assignments (and permissions are set appropriately automatically)
• Instructors can upload data on informed consent after a course is complete (which students opted in or opted out of making their data available for research studies)
• Instructors can download data about repos (commit messages, PRs, issues, etc); the data is marked with data about consent so that data can be filtered out if it is data for non-consenting students, or teams that do not have 100% consent rates.

More information

This project involves constructing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for a replacement to the ucsb-cs-github-linker app (currently in Ruby on Rails) in Spring/React (the CMPSC 156 tech stack).

Currently, the ucsb-cs-github-linker is used in a variety of courses at UCSB. However, the code base is difficult to maintain, because few students know Ruby on Rails. It is very hard to onboard new students to this tech stack (it can take two weeks just to on board someone to the point of being able to run the application in dev mode).

If we could build an MVP using the Spring Boot / React stack, then the CMPSC 156 class could maintain the app going forward. This would provide a valuable example of a real app with real users for the course.

In addition, it would help to provide a better platform for building additional features to explore new teaching and evaluation strategies (both the implementation of those, and research about their effectiveness).

The main features are (this is a brutally summarized outline of an MVP):

• Login with Github OAuth instead of Google OAuth.
• Admins can assign roles: default role is student, but also Instructor, TA/LA, Admin.
• CRUD operations for courses
• CSV upload and interactive CRUD for roster students associated with courses
• Workflow to “join a course” and generate invitation to course organization.

There are many features beyond that list that could be added next, some of which are in the current Ruby on Rails app:

For instructors:

• Automatically setting up teams based on CSV file
• Automatically setting up repos for assignments on individual or team level
• Gathering information/statistics about these repos

For researchers:

• Ability to subscribe to and process GitHub event triggers
• Ability to connect GitHub event triggers to Slack events
• Abiity to gather commit, PR, timeline event information

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