Instructions on how to run app:
git clone livienyin@bitbucket.org/livienyin/oneplusone.git cd oneplusone bundle install bundle exec rake db:create bundle exec rake db:schema:load rails server
Scheduler.rake contains a “mailing” task that can be called with cron (or the Heroku Scheduler). The “mailing” task calls the “generate_groups” task to create groupings. It then emails each person with their partners for the week.
The “mailing” task will only function if you have set the environment variables GMAIL_USERNAME and GMAIL_PASSWORD. It is recommended that you use the crontab.sh file to run the job. This file will source a file env.sh (not included in this repository) that should include exports of these two environment variables. It is also important to make sure that the ruby environment is properly configured in this file. Here is an example of what an env.sh file might look like.
— START —
export GMAIL_USERNAME=“gmail_username” export GMAIL_PASSWORD=“password”
# load rvm ruby source ~/.rvm/environments/ruby-1.9.3-p392
— END —
The following instructions explain how to configure your application to automatically send emails to all registered employees:
Type crontab -e into the command line and add the following lines. Make sure to replace the value of ONE_PLUS_ONE_ROOT with the name of the absolute path to the directory that you cloned oneplusone into. You can get this path by typing “pwd” into the command line.
ONE_PLUS_ONE_ROOT=“~/oneplusone”
-
17 * * FRI $ONE_PLUS_ONE_ROOT/cronjob.sh
*This schedules the job to be run every Friday at 5pm.
What design decisions were made:
In addition to the Person, Team, and TeamMembership tables, I created Grouping and GroupingParticipant tables to keep track of the date of each grouping. When generating groups, I start with a set of ungrouped people and an empty set of stragglers. For each person, the algorithm selects the teammate that s/he was grouped with the longest time ago. Then, the two people are grouped and removed from the set of ungrouped people. This ensures that people have grouped with all other teammates before repeating a person. If by the end, there are any stragglers that do not get grouped because they’re on an odd-numbered team, the algorithm finds the teammate s/he was grouped with the longest time ago, and adds the straggler to that teammates grouping.
How I tested the app:
I began with rspec unit testing but found that automated testing was very difficult with the somewhat chaotic behavior of the pairing algorithm. I tested the algorithm by manually generating the groupings in rails console and verifying that the groupings seemed appropriate to the project parameters.