Collaboration/Team/Processes

We (the Collaboration team working on Flow) are an agile team. We come up with processes that work to deliver software, donning suits as required.


 * Work on Flow current iteration in Trello, right to left, top to bottom.
 * Review Echo and Flow open patches
 * Attend to Echo+Flow tests dashboard

Project

 * Our deliverable is simple, but big: Extension:Flow.
 * The team is also responsible for Echo (Notifications), also Page Triage, Thanks, etc.
 * Incorporating Flow into MediaWiki often requires changes to core (BTW "MediaWiki core" is not the same as "Core Features" team"), so we also make changes there
 * configuration of the extension for WMF wikis is in, just like other extensions
 * Flow introduces new features to the MediaWiki UI visual design (formerly "Agora"). We cooperate with other engineers to eventually update core with generally-useful ones..

Review means release!

 * Echo and Flow open patches to review

When you +2 a change to Flow in gerrit, Jenkins will merge it to master. It's now on the release train to appear in front of users!
 * It will appear on beta-labs shortly.
 * It will appear on mediawiki.org next Thursday per the (Deployments calendar)

Meanwhile... Our team, especially our Product Manager who is the sole person who can "Accept" a story, tests new features on our labs test instance ee-flow. So when you +2 any Flow change in gerrit, you must do some housekeeping:
 * update ee-flow to master: in your work Flow directory, make ee-flow, or if you're already on ee-flow cd /srv/mediawiki/extensions/Flow && make master
 * drag the Trello card for the change to "Testing", make sure it's obvious how to test.

Master has to work
Everything we merge to Flow master is deployed on en-beta and the ee-flow labs machine within minutes, and then our Jenkins Continuous Integration setup runs our simple  browser tests against it every 12 hours or so. So merged commits must not break.
 * Review the Echo+Flow tests dashboard.
 * You should rebase against latest master and verify it works locally and run tests before you move a card to "BLOCKED" (because it's awaiting final code review)

Any problems you encounter with master should be filed as bugs in, because master is externally visible on en-beta and ee-flow.

Flow releases to production
Flow is enabled on a few pages on mediawiki, metawiki, and enwiki (see Flow/Rollout which also explains the process).

So whatever is in master as of Thursday morning PST will be deployed to mediawiki.org around noon Thursday as part of the new 1.23wmfNN release. This then "flows" to metawiki the next Tuesday, and then to enwiki a week later on Thursday.


 * We have an informal code freeze 24 hours before the Wednesday deployment. Starting Tuesday 11am PDT do not +2 a gerrit change unless it's vital, safe, and tested.
 * Any patches requiring DB updates should be flagged (do they need to be in DB review?).

Backwards and forwards compatibility
Note that mw.org, meta, and enwiki will be running different releases yet talking to the same Flow DB and external store, so all DB updates must support later and older code.

Likewise, Flow information in the cache (memcache/redis) may be shared between different code releases, so we have to carefully consider bumps to.

Release readiness
On Tuesday after our unofficial code Freeze
 * Update core and all extensions on ee-flow to master, run upgrade.php
 * Review browser tests on beta labs on the Echo+Flow CI dashboardtests dashboard, they should be passing. If not, try Flow on the Beta cluster.
 * In particular Flow interacts with Echo, Parsoid, Thanks, AbuseFilter, ConfirmEdit & SpamBlacklist.

Fixes and backports
Flow has a Tuesday window in the Deployments calendar. We usually use it for DB updates and other complicated feature deployments, and tp roll Flow out to new pages and wikis.

If we need to backport a fix
 * prioritize with Danny and quiddity
 * get OK from greg-g to add it to Deployments calendar, probably in a SWAT deploy window.
 * Danny or spage adds a card to current Trello calendar, gives it a deadline
 * get it merged to master well in advance
 * prepare backports, get them merged, the prepare Flow submodule bumps in the branches
 * use the Etherpad http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Flow_Deployments to keep track of complicated deployments
 * do prolific manual testing afterwards

Trello notes
Two boards
 * Flow current iteration
 * Every bug and story the engineers should get done in the current two-week three-week "sprint".


 * Flow backlog
 * Everything that isn't a story to get done in the next three weeks:
 * Design work (purple tag) for the next iteration
 * Stories we're refining for future iterations
 * Business analysis and community liaison work
 * The backlog of all good ideas and maybe-someday

So "backlog" also means "readiness", "prep", etc. Better names welcome.

Reach out to engineers for any BLOCKED cards, usually they're awaiting code review in Gerrit.

Thereafter the highest priority cards are at the top.

Story grooming

 * All design issues should be wrapped up before the next iteration, so their due date is the Tuesday before the iteration starts, so engineers can estimate at the Wednesday poker meeting.
 * want designers to be working two iterations out,
 * When cards move to Flow current iteration board, the designer remains on the card.

Story review and estimation
We use http://hatjitsu.wmflabs.org for estimation

Engineers READ THIS BIT
Developers work in Flow current iteration:
 * Work right-to-left – help with code review in gerrit, see if you can help cards "Blocked with Questions", make progress on the cards you have "In Development"

After that,
 * Take the top-most card from "Sprint ZZ column", add your name as a member to it, drag it to the "In Development" column.
 * When you think you're done rebase your change on latest master, make sure it still works (run all tests), add the gerrit URL in a comment, and move to the "Code Review" column.
 * If you need design guidance or have questions about the design, ask on IRC. Also move to "Blocked with questions" with a question, reach out to a designer, Danny, spage, etc.

When you +2 a change in gerrit
 * run make ee-flow to deploy it on ee-flow (see wikitech page for ssh setup)
 * move the card to Testing.

When you need something from design, talk on IRC, and:
 * add the purple "Design" label
 * if a designer isn't associated with the card add moizsyed_ to the card.
 * under Activity, add a comment with @username I need XYZ to create a mention.
 * If you can't get any further, move the card into the Blocked with questions column.

Bugs

 * We (Danny and others) review bugs in Phabricator
 * all open bugs in Flow, Echo, Thanks, grouped by priority (Need triage first), then by date modified

Bug triage
Ideally takes place in standup.

December 2014 in the above query there are 343 tasks in Needs triage. We'll parcel them out among the team.

When you triage a bug, edit it.
 * improve task Title and Description
 * change Priority to something
 * add informative tags to Projects field, e.g. design, easy, . Note Projects encompasses tags, teams, extensions, etc.
 * if you think team should evaluate, add Core-Features to Projects (our team name, we need a better one)
 * this means it goes in the backlog column on our board (perhaps we'll rename this to "Consider for next sprint" or something.

Note every Phabricator project has a workboard, but we don't have to visit multiple extensions' workboards to manage team work. So we won't use each extension's workboard.

Old Bugzilla queries

 * Flow new bugs (2 weeks)
 * Flow changed open bugs (2 weeks)
 * Flow open bugs
 * Flow all bugs
 * Also, Bug Report - a nice grid view of Flow bugs (thanks StevenW)

In triage, if the bug is valid
 * change status from UNCO to NEW
 * adjust Severity
 * Can apply "design" keyword in bugzilla to note a bug that will take design, likewise "performance" keyword. Add "easi
 * Danny can set Priority (see guidelines) indicating Flow team's likely schedule for working on the bug. Bugzilla users will change this.
 * Adjust severity (see guidelines) if it's obviously wrong. Bugzilla users will change this.
 * Only pull bugs into Trello when design is going to work on them or when engineers start fixing them. Decided to manually create a Trello card for every valid new bug if there isn't one already.
 * Just create a Trello card titled "[bug NNNNN] bug summary" in "New bug reports" column of Flow backlog board,
 * TODO Need an easy way to create Trello cards from a named set of bugs, probably an addition to Bugello
 * Always mention the Trello card URL (get it from card's Share and more... > Link to this card) in a bug comment similar to "Added to Flow backlog - https://trello.com/c/cardID"

Gerrit notes

 * We need to review both Flow and Echo patches. Here's a dashboard for both; same dashboard for 1+ week old (this time period can be tweaked freely according to the search documentation).
 * Your commit message must have a line about testing. What unit test or browser test exercises the feature, or why there's no test.
 * Use comments to be clear in what you want. "I want bernie to review the data change before I'm comfortable +2ing"
 * +1 means "OK to merge but I want someone else to take a look"
 * two +1s means it's good enough to merge. The second +1 on a patch should either +2 it or explain why not in comment.
 * Gerrit forgets +1s when someone submits a new patch set, so whoever does so should summarize the state, e.g. "mlitn +1'd patch 5 and this addresses his concerns, so need one more approval."

Working on a long-lived branch

 * Create the branch in gerrit, e.g. frontend-rewrite
 * Check it out locally
 * modify .gitreview in it to add  and commit the fix
 * To update the branch to latest master
 * $ git checkout origin/frontend-rewrite; git merge origin/master; git review
 * git review will ask if you want to submit all the commits on the branch; it's OK to do so, these are the existing commits that were merged in, gerrit doesn't really submit them as new.
 * to set a labs machine to check out that branch, crontab -e and add
 * */5 * * * * cd /mnt/vagrant/mediawiki/extensions/Flow && git checkout frontend-rewrite && git pull --ff-only

Code hygiene

 * The Jenkins jobs for the extension does PHP and jshint checks, and runs our PHP unit tests
 * To see the tests, look at the comments from jenkins-bot on a change, e.g. 115110 and follow the links to the CI run
 * we could enable php codesniffer ( phpcs --standard=path/to/codesniffer/MediaWiki . ), but lots of warnings
 * Engineers must set up the pre-review and pre-commit git hooks:
 * make installhooks
 * these run similar tests upon git commit.
 * ToDo: everyone commit automation improvements (git commit hooks, local test scripts, Makefile commands, etc.) to and

Test
We have various tests (see ) but not great coverage. Before you make a big change
 * write tests for it
 * In Retrospectives engineers broadly agree we should write more tests, and when fixing bugs should write tests that fail without the code that fixes the problem. But these are just Good intentions...
 * make phpunit, run browsertests

Browser testing
It's not hard to run Flow's , see Quality Assurance/Browser testing/Running tests Every developer needs to understand the features we're testing and proactively fix tests as part of changes so the tests remain green. Assume that any front-end change will require updating tests. Just read the high-level test scenarios in tests/browser/features/*.feature.

To run tests yourself, read Quality Assurance/Browser testing/Running tests. In a nutshell:
 * It's a role in MediaWiki-Vagrant, or install rvm, then Ruby, gem, and bundle manager.
 * On you local wiki, add 'Talk:Flow QA' to  ; optionally you can create a "Selenium_user" account so your own username don't get all its Echo notifications.
 * Give the username running the tests (yourself or "Selenium_user") block-user, suppress and delete rights in order to test these features. In a typical configuration, use Special:UserRights, and add the user to the "administrator" and "oversight" groups.
 * To run the tests
 * in MW-Vagrant against MW-Vagrant: enter make vagrant-browsertests
 * locally against a web server such as ee-flow:
 * change the variables above to run the browser tests against your own wiki
 * the default browser is Firefox (note Firefox 32 is broken), there's also BROWSER=phantomjs
 * you can append :  to run the test with that line number, e.g. ... bundle exec cucumber features/flow_logged_in.feature:24
 * if you just supply features, all browser tests will run, and some will fail.
 * The browser tests assume an existing Flow QA board with existing posts, so on a new wiki run the tests three times and thereafter they should stabilize.

Browser tests are annotated with the browser(s) and server(s) on which they should pass, such as @chrome @en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org @firefox @internet_explorer_10 @phantomjs @test2.wikipedia.org (and with other annotations like,  , etc.). Continuous integration passes the appropriate tags to  to only run the tests with these tags, e.g.  ... bundle exec cucumber --tags @en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org --tags @firefox If a browser test fails, check its annotations, maybe it's not expected to work in your configurations; conversely if it passes, make sure it has annotations for your browser.

Running more than one test often fails on phantomjs version 1.9.7 because the its WebDriver test doesn't reset session state between tests, a known issue.

A big risk of a change is it degrades user experience on one of many browsers none of us use. To try Flow out on alternate browsers, see Browser testing and design tools on officewiki.

Performance
Flow is slow. It has to get faster, it mustn't get slower.
 * Use the Network tab in your browser's developer tools
 * See Flow bugs tagged performance TODO
 * View > Source of a page includes a line
 * We have profile hooks
 * TODO
 * We have some monitoring hooks at http://graphite.wikimedia.org
 * in its left navigation, expand Graphite > MediaWiki > Flow, and FlowHooks
 * so for example http://graphite.wikimedia.org/render/?target=MediaWiki.FlowHooks.onPerformAction.tavg&from=20140205& (this hook also gets called when we don't run, so the average would be way off

Security
Read and follow Security_for_developers and its accompanying Security checklist for developers. The Manual:MediaWiki Security Guide has background on these topics.

Templating security
Chris Steipp commented on Flow's templating security review bug "please follow my suggestion about policy (here), and make sure the team has a policy that,
 * If substitutions are used in html attributes, those attributes must be quoted with double quotes.
 * Make sure any SafeString objects have their escaping as close to the creation of the SafeString as possible, and that should be as close to the output as possible. It would be really helpful if I don't have to trace back more than 1 (or at most 2) function calls to see the escaping.

Refactoring

 * If it feels more scope than a bug fix, make a card for it, ask spage to add to the iteration.
 * Engineers need to campaign for their ideas – bring up major code changes in the "daily" standup, referring to the story card

Retrospectives
Currently at the Flow_retrospective etherpad. We've also tried dogfooding Flow by doing retrospectives on a Flow Team Retrospective Flow board. In late 2013 we did some retrospectives in the Afterparty etherpad.

During the meeting, start by adding issues you want to discuss in one of the three sections ("What worked", "What didn't work", "What's still confusing"). Then, if you're interested in discussing someone else's issue, add +1.

Other resources

 * E2 (Flow) calendar resource: In Google Calendar, add  to Other calendars, see Calendars page on office wiki for help.