Course automation submission: Checking legal group composition

[EleonoraBorzi]

Course Automation: Checking legal group composition (Proposal: #996)

Members:

Henrik Kultala ([email protected])
GitHub: hengque

Eleonora Borzi ([email protected])
GitHub: EleonoraBorzis

Group rules for this course:

• Max 3 persons in a group

• You cannot be with the same persons for more than 2 projects.

• You can work alone on one or at most two projects.

• When you send a pull request for registration, please follow the name convention of using the email addresses of two members to create the folder: email-email.

  • This is assumed to be the same email addresses as specified in the readme.

  • This is also assumed to mean “all members of the group” and not “two members”; i.e. if there are three members then all three members’ email address should be included in the folder name.

Proposal

When a new project is proposed, the readme and the folder name are checked for the names of the group members. The group validity is checked against the rules stated above and a comment with the results is posted on the PR. It also checks that the name of the folder is correct in relation to the email addresses in the readme.

Tools:

Github Actions
Bonus: Status Check on GitHub
Docker

Implementation:

The action can be found on the public repo: https://github.com/EleonoraBorzis/group-validity-action

We decided to use Docker to make it more accessible to the public. The action will post a comment on the PR depending on what requirements are met and what type of scenario the pull request is.
In this action there can be the following scenarios:

1. The pull request is not from a fork. Then this action will end early with a pass and not do anything else.
2. The pull request does not add exactly one README file. In this case, it could be a TA that created the pull request so to not interfere, the action will post a comment about the submission probably not being from a student. The action will then end with a pass.
3. The KTH mail addresses in the README and the name of the folder does not match. The action will post a comment saying that it's not valid if it's a student project proposal and will fail the check on the PR.
4. The size of the group is not allowed. The action will fail the pull request and post a comment regarding this.
5. The members have worked together more than the maximum number. The action will fail the pull request and post a comment regarding this.
6. The pull request satisfied all the requirements. Then this action will post a comment saying this and end with a pass..

Exception case: One case that the action will fail is when a TA adds one single README file in a folder under contributions/. It is hard to discern this case with the case when students adds a README file in their folders, so we have decided to fail the pull request to give feedback to students.

The requirements that we think we have achieved are:

	Yes	No	Remarkable
The work is done before April 6, 2021 (in order to be useful for the course)	Yes
The automation task produces a PR status or issue / PR comment	Yes
The automation task is reusable	Yes (next year for this course)
The task runs on a standard platform	Yes (Github action)
The code for the task is available	Yes (public repo)		Well documented repo

Improvements:
One improvement could be to use a secondary action that discern when the pull request is from a student proposal or from a TA. This would help us to give the proper feedback to the pull request.

[EleonoraBorzi]

@SophieHYe We are done! :)

[SophieHYe]

Nice work. I am merging your PR.