Managing peer review (the reviews
category)¶
Peer reviewing is an important part of a programming curriculum, so of course
RepoBee facilitates this! Like much of the other functionality in RepoBee, the
peer review functionality is built around indirect access through teams with
limited access privileges. In short, every student repo up for review gets an
associated peer review team generated, which has pull
access to the repo.
Each student then gets added to 0 < N < num_students
peer review teams, and
are to open a peer review issue in the associated repos. This is at least the
the default. See Selecting peer review allocation algorithm for other available review
allocation schemes.
Getting started with peer reviews (the assign
action)¶
The bulk of the work is performed by the reviews assign
. Most of its
arguments it has in common with the other commands of RepoBee. The only
non-standard arguments are --issue
and --num-reviews
, the former of
which we’ve actually already seen in the issues open
command (see
Opening Issues (the open action)). We will assume that both --base-url
and --org-name
are
already configured in the configuration file (if you don’t know what this
means, have a look at Configuration file). Thus, the only things we must specify are
--students/--students-file
and --num-reviews
(--issue
is optional,
more on that later). Let’s make a minimal call with the assign
action, and
then inspect the log output to figure out what happened. Recall that
students.txt
lists our three favorite students slarse, glassey and glennol
(see Set up student repositories (the setup action)).
$ repobee assign-reviews -a task-1 --sf students.txt --num-reviews 2
# Output nabbed from the log file, this will not appear on stdout
# step 1
[INFO] Created team slarse-task-1-review
[INFO] Created team glennol-task-1-review
[INFO] Created team glassey-task-1-review
# step 2
[INFO] Adding members glennol, glassey to team slarse-task-1-review
[INFO] Adding members glassey, slarse to team glennol-task-1-review
[INFO] Adding members slarse, glennol to team glassey-task-1-review
# steps 3 and 4, interleaved
[INFO] Opened issue glennol-task-1/#1-'Peer review'
[INFO] Adding team glennol-task-1-review to repo glennol-task-1 with 'pull' permission
[INFO] Opened issue glassey-task-1/#2-'Peer review'
[INFO] Adding team glassey-task-1-review to repo glassey-task-1 with 'pull' permission
[INFO] Opened issue slarse-task-1/#2-'Peer review'
[INFO] Adding team slarse-task-1-review to repo slarse-task-1 with 'pull' permission
The following steps were performed:
One review team per repo was created (
<student>-task-1-review
).Two students were added to each review team. Note that these allocations are _random_. For obvious resons, there can be at most
num_students-1
peer reviews per repo. So, in this case, we are at the maximum.An issue was opened in each repo with the title
Peer review
, and a body saying something likeYou should peer review this repo.
. The review team students were assigned to the issue as well (although this is not apparent from the logging).The review teams were added to their corresponding repos with
pull
permission. This permission allows members of the team to view the repo and open issues, but they can’t push to (and therefore can’t modify) the repo.
That’s it for the basic functionality. The intent is that students should open
an issue in every repo they are to peer review, with a specific title. The issues
can then be searched by title, and the check
action can find which students
have opened issues in the repositories they’ve been assigned to review. Now,
let’s talk a bit about that --issue
argument.
Important
Assigning peer reviews gives the reviewers read-access to the repos they are to review. This means that if you use issues to communicate grades/feedback to your students, the reviewers will also see this feedback! It is therefore important to remove the peer review teams (see Cleaning up with (then end action)).
Specifying a custom issue¶
The default issue is really meant to be replaced with something more specific to
the course and assignment. For example, say that there were five tasks in the
task-2
repo, and the students should review tasks 2 and 3 based on
some criteria. It would then be beneficial to specify this in the peer review
issue, so we’ll write up our own little issue to replace the default one.
Remember that the first line is taken to be the title, in exactly the same way
as issue files are treated in Opening Issues (the open action).
Review of task-2
Hello! The students assigned to this issue have been tasked to review this
repo. Each of you should open _one_ issue with the title `Peer review` and
the following content:
## Task 2
### Code style
Comments on code style, such as readability and general formatting.
### Time complexity
Is the algorithm O(n)? If not, try to figure out what time complexity it is
and point out what could have been done better.
## Task 3
### Code style
Comments on code style, such as readabilty and general formatting.
Assuming the file was saved as issue.md
, we can now run the command
specifying the issue like this:
$ repobee reviews assign -a task-2 --sf students.txt --num-reviews 2 --issue issue.md
This will have the same effect as last time, but with the custom issue being opened instead.
Checking review progress (the check
action)¶
The check
action provides a quick and easy way of checking which
students have performed their reviews. You provide it with the same information
that you do for assign
, but additionally also provide a regex to match
against issue titles. The command then finds all of the associated review
teams, and checks which students have opened issues with matching titles in
their alloted repositories. Of course, this says nothing about the content of
those issues: it only checks that the issues have been opened at all.
--num-reviews
is also required here, as it is used as an expected value for
how many reviews each student should be assigned to review. It is a simple
but fairly effective way of detecting if students have simply left their review
teams. Here’s an example call:
$ repobee reviews check -a task-2 --sf students.txt --num-reviews 2 --title-regex '\APeer review\Z'
reviewer num done num remaining repos remaining
glennol 0 2 glassey-task-2,slarse-task-2
slarse 2 0
glassey 0 2 glennol-task-2,slarse-task-2
The output is color-coded in the terminal, making it easier to parse. We make use of this when doing peer reviews in a classroom settings, as it allows us to quickly check which students are done without having to ask them out loud every five minutes. The next command lets you clean up review teams and thereby revoke reviewers’ read access once reviews are over and done with.
Hint
Use the issues list
command with the --title-regex
(with a regex
matching the review issue title) and --show-body
options to actually
check the contents of the students’ review issues.
Cleaning up with (then end
action)¶
The one downside of using teams for access privileges is that we bloat the
organization with a ton of teams. Once the deadline has passed and all peer
reviews are done, there is little reason to keep them. It can also often be a
good idea to revoke the reviewers’ access to reviewed repos if you yourself
plan to provide feedback on the issue tracker, so as not to let the reviewers
see it. Therefore, the end
action can be used to remove all peer review
teams for a given set of student repos, both cleaning up the organization and
revoking reviewers’ read access. Let’s say that we’re completely done with the
peer reviews of task-1
, and want to remove the review teams. It’s as simple
as:
$ repobee reviews end -a task-1 --sf students.txt
# Progress bars will show how many teams have been deleted thus far
Warning
The end
action deletes review allocations created by
assign
. This is an irreversible action. You cannot run
check
after running end
for any given set of student repos, and
there is no functionality for retrieving deleted review allocations. Only
use end
when reviews are truly done, and you have collected what
results you need. If being able to backup and restore review allocations is
something you need, please open an issue with a feature request on the
issue tracker.
And that’s it, the review teams are gone. If you also want to close the related
issues, you can simply use the issues close
command for that (see
Closing Issues (the close action)). The end
action plays one more important role; if you mess
something up when assigning the peer reviews. The next section details how you
can deal with such a scenario.
Messing up and getting back on track¶
Let’s say you messed something up with allocating the peer reviews. For example,
if you left out a student, there is no easy way to rectify the allocations such
that that student is included. Let’s say we did just that, and forgot to include
the student cabbage
in the reviews for task-2
back at
Getting started with peer reviews (the assign action). We then do the following:
Check if any reviews have already been posted. This can easily be performed with
repobee reviews check -a task-2 --sf students.txt -r '^Peer review$' --num-reviews 2
(assuming the naming conventions were followed!). Take appropriate action if you find any reviews already posted (appropriate being anything you see fit to alleviate the situation of affected students possibly being assigned new repos to review).Delete the review teams with
repobee reviews end -a task-2 --sf students.txt
Close all review issues with
repobee issues close -a task-2 --sf students.txt -r '^Review of task-2$'
Create a new
issue.md
file apologetically explaining that you messed up:
Review of task-2 (for real this time!)
Sorry, I messed up with the allocations previously. Disregard the previous
allocations (repo access has been revoked anyway).
Assign peer reviews again, with the new issue, with
repobee assign-reviews -a task-2 --sf students.txt --num-reviews 2 --issue issue.md
And that’s it! Disaster averted.
Selecting peer review allocation algorithm¶
The default allocation algorithm is as described in Managing peer review (the reviews category), and is
suitable for when reviewers do not need to interact with the students whom they
review. This is however not always the case, sometimes it is beneficial for
reviewers to to interact with reviewees (is that a word?), especially if the
peer review is done in the classroom. Because of this, RepoBee also
provides a _pairwise_ allocation scheme, which allocates reviews such that
if student A
reviews student B
, then student B
reviews student
A
(except for an A->B->C->A
kind of deal in one group if there are an
odd amount of students). This implemented as a plugin, so to run with this
scheme, you add -p pairwise
in front of the command.
$ repobee -p pairwise reviews assign -a task-1 --sf students.txt
Note that the pairwise algorithm ignores the --num-reviews
argument, and
will issue a warning if this is set (to anything but 1, but you should just not
specify it). For more details on plugins in RepoBee, see Plugins for RepoBee (the plugin category).