Wikimedia Platform Engineering/MediaWiki Core Team/Quarterly review, July 2013/Release Management and QA

Date: July 31st, 2013

Time: 8:30am Pacific (15:30 UTC)

Who: Topics: Deploy process/pipeline, release process, bug fixing, code review, code management, security deploy/release, automation prioritization
 * Leads: Greg G, Chris M
 * Participants (invited): Antoine, Sam, Chris S, Chad, Zeljko, Michelle G, Robla, Sumana, Quim, Maryana, James F, Ryan Lane, Ken, Terry, Tomasz, Alolita

Sprints
We plan to put the items below into Release Management and QA related sprints sometime between July and December 2013:

Relevant Bugzilla searches:
 * whiteboard:deploysprint-13
 * whiteboard:rmqa-2013
 * whiteboard:rmqa-2013 or deploysprint-13

git-deploy

 * tracking
 * - auditing salt scripts for completeness
 * - deal with dirty git fetches properly
 * Questions:
 * Will Platform take over maintenance of git-deploy?

monitoring (production)

 * - Better 500 error/PHP exception monitoring
 * - create monitoring for the issue in that bug
 * Questions:
 * Where should this be stashed in our monitoring?

deployment script improvements

 * - Make updates atomic (e.g. symlink + directory move tricks or git-deploy?)
 * - Some improvements for the deployment scripts
 * - Reconciling the use of timestamps on Javascript files (rsync vs ResourceLoader vs git)
 * - resetUserTokens.php not usable on large wikis
 * Kill deployment hacks with fire - live hacks that are still applied as of 2013-05-16

multi-site awareness

 * - mwscript.php/mctest.php does not know about memcache in both datacenters
 * - migrate scripts from hume to terbium
 * Database config cleanup -- multisite awareness in MediaWiki

Labs related

 * - the use of BetaLabs as a true canary (tracking)
 * - allowing extensions to be run from not master
 * - hermetic test environment on labs (vagrant or otherwise)
 * - setup monitoring of betalabs
 * also usable for throw away dev environments for developer use