not-so-badass 0.7

(not so) bad assessments

badass: (not so) bad assessments

badass helps to produce automated assessments of programming projects. It is likely to produce bad assessments of good projects, but good assessments of bad projects. Indeed, it can test:

• if the project compiles
• the return values of functions on defined test cases
• static properties on the code
• traces of the execution

But it cannot test:

• code readability and clarity
• algorithm relevance and quality
• all such aspects one would like to test on good projects

So, bad projects are likely to fail on the first group of tests, while good project will pass and thus remain to be assessed manually.

The main goal of badass is thus to quickly produce superficial assessments for a large number of students, allowing to focus on the best projects for a manual analysis.

Security

badass will execute all foreign code inside a sandbox provided by firejail so you won't harm your system executing malicious or badly programmed projects.

Current state and future

This is a very early version that is (mostly) limited to C projects. In the future versions, we may have:

• online submission of projects and report to the students on a given set of tests
• a library of standard tests on source code and strace logs
• support for other languages

Installation

To start with, just pip install not-so-badass. Then, try to run badass -h, if you get the help message then, everything should be OK.

Troubleshooting libclang issues

You may have problems with libclang that does not load properly. badass tries hard to find the dynamic library but it may fail. In such a case, you should set environment variable BADASS_LIBCLANG to the full path of the libclang dynamic library. For instance, on my Linux, it's /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libclang-9.so.1. So I set BADASS_LIBCLANG=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libclang-9.so.1 in my .bashrc and everything is fine.

On MacOS, it has been reported that you need to install the XCode Command Line Tools, and you'll find the dynamic library in a path like /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/lib/libclang.dylib.

Setting BADASS_LIBCLANG may be required if you need to run badass within badass run (eg, in prepare.sh or build.sh scripts) because in this case, badass is locked by firejail and cannot find libclang by itself.

I'm using MacOS, it does not work

Send me a bug report, perhaps we can interact and have this problem solved. I don't own a Mac so I can't test.

I'm using Windows, it does not work

Indeed. It will never. (Try with the Windows Subsystem for Linux.)

Licence

badass (C) 2020, Franck Pommereau [e-mail]

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.