Quality Assurance/Status 2012-2015

Last update on: 2013-03-12

2012-10-19
Zeljko Filipin has an initial set of browser tests checked in to Github. These will be moved into Gerrit soon.

2012-10-monthly
QA Engineer Željko Filipin has made great improvements to the existing automated browser tests and has created some new Mobile tests as well. Mobile QA Engineer Michelle Grover is creating an automatable regression test suite for MobileFrontend. These tests are currently running as builds under a hosted instance of Jenkins, with the intention of moving them to the WMF Continuous Integration environment pending upgrades to the machines hosting gerrit and Jenkins.

2012-11-06
Filipin and McMahon now have browser tests in Gerrit, in qa/browsertests. They are porting existing tests from RSpec to Cucumber. The UploadWizard test is the most complex and they're in the midst of porting it. See Qa/test backlog.

2012-11-13
Ported the toughest test (UploadWizard) to Cucumber, created backlog of tests to be automated, will introduce Cucumber to feature development soon.

Chris, this month, aims to socialize Cucumber acceptance test-writing (using "given-when-then" format) in browser testing, to get developers to more regularly write these tests as they work and commit. He'll be talking to Fabrice, Arthur, Siebrand, James Forrester, and probably Tomasz. Coverage goals: extensions that are on beta or test2 right now.

2012-11-27
Working on architecture, creating basic new tests, refactoring those for cleanliness. Public announcement will be coming very soon, when the existing exemplar tests are in final or near-final form. 

2012-11-30
Noisy tests failing for known reasons have been removed from the suite, and the suite is now completely green. Adding more tests is immanent. Browser tests identified a serious regression in UploadWizard running on test2 and prevented its release to production.

2012-11-monthly
In November, the QA team created a backlog of tests to be automated, ported existing tests from RSpec to Cucumber, and is now working on browser testing architecture, creating basic new tests (see the  repository in Gerrit), and refactoring tests for cleanliness. Chris McMahon began discussing automated browser tests with Wikimedia tech managers to get developers writing those tests as they develop extensions deployed on Wikimedia sites; public announcement will be coming very soon, when the existing example tests are in final or near-final form. Noisy tests failing for known reasons have been removed from the suite, which is now completely green (that is, passing); the team will soon be writing and adding more tests. Browser tests in November identified a serious regression in UploadWizard running on test2 and prevented its release to production.

2012-12-10
Refactoring Jenkins builds for granularity, fixing last bits of tests known to be broken. Starting to expand test coverage, possible candidates PageTriage, Echo, VE, etc. 

2012-12-18
<section begin="2012-12-18"/>Refactoring Jenkins builds for granularity, fixing last bits of tests known to be broken. Starting to expand test coverage, possible candidates PageTriage, Echo, VE, etc.<section end="2012-12-18"/>

2012-12-28
<section begin="2012-12-28"/>Quim and Chris have a goal to get all the browser automation docs refactored by January 4th.<section end="2012-12-28"/>

2012-12-monthly
<section begin="2012-12-monthly"/>After its announcement about the state of automated browser testing on wikitech-l, the QA team continued to expand test coverage, improve system and project documentation, and publicize and socialize the project by means of the "Browser Testing" MediaWiki Group. <section end="2012-12-monthly"/>

2013-01-22
<section begin="2013-01-22"/>Architecture and configuration are stable, focus now is on increasing test coverage by making existing tests more extensive and by covering new features. <section end="2013-01-22"/>

2013-01-29
<section begin="2013-01-29"/>Added browser test coverage for the Math extension. (Math was briefly broken after the EQIAD migration, this is a valuable regression test). Adding more coverage all the time, we've instituted a weekly pair-programming session every Friday morning PST. <section end="2013-01-29"/>

2013-01-monthly
<section begin="2013-01-monthly"/>Architecture and configuration for browser testing are now stable, and the focus shifted to increasing test coverage by making existing tests more extensive and covering new features. An example is the Math extension, which was briefly broken after the data center migration. The team has also instituted a weekly pair-programming session every Friday.<section end="2013-01-monthly"/>

2013-02-05
<section begin="2013-02-05"/>Automated test for Math extension exposed an issue with the production deployment of 4 February. Proposing adding support for PDBHandler, a labs projects in development. Several new tests in the pipeline, one in conjunction with a new volunteer.<section end="2013-02-05"/>

2013-02-12
<section begin="2013-02-12"/>Will be cleaning up js error check causing failures in IE8 and below. Will be adding new tests also. Timeouts in test environments have been causing extra failures recently<section end="2013-02-12"/>

2013-02-25
<section begin="2013-02-25"/>Created several tests in support of Language team with more to come, including first test for VisualEditor. Browser test tech talk in SF Thu Feb 28<section end="2013-02-25"/>

2013-03-05
<section begin="2013-03-05"/>Added E3 tests. Preparing for test event to increase the backlog. Sophisticated tests for Language need tweaking/research.<section end="2013-03-05"/>

2013-02-monthly
<section begin="2013-02-monthly"/>Added E3 tests. Preparing for test event to increase the backlog. Sophisticated tests for Language need tweaking/research.<section end="2013-02-monthly"/>

2013-03-12
<section begin="2013-03-12"/> Exercise to build the test backlog using Search as an example was successful, test backlog for search now contains wide variety of regression tests for automation. Browser tests continue to identify significant regression issues with new features in particular. <section end="2013-03-12"/>