Wikimedia Release Engineering Team/Quarterly review, August 2014

Date: August 14th | Time: 17:00 UTC | Slides: TBC | Notes: etherpad - on-wiki

Topics: Deploy process and pipeline; browser, manual, and unit testing; everything from development to deployment.

Who

 * Lead: Greg
 * Team: Antoine, Chris, Dan, Sam, Mukunda, Rummana, Zeljko

Big picture
Release Engineering is where our code quality efforts can be amplified. When we do things well, we start to see more responsive development with higher quality code. That is our mission.

What we want to accomplish:
 * More appreciation of, response to, and creation of tests in development
 * Better monitoring and reporting out of our development and deployment processes, especially test environments and pre-deployment
 * Reduce time between code being merged and being deployed
 * Provide information about software quality in a way that informs development and release decisions
 * Help WMF Engineering learn and adapt from experience

Team roles

 * Deployment tooling1: Sam, Mukunda
 * Automated browser tests: Chris M, Zeljko
 * Manual browser testing: Rummana
 * Beta cluster development/maintenance: Antoine
 * Jenkins/Zuul: Antoine, Zeljko
 * Phabricator: Mukunda
 * Vagrant: Dan

Deployment tooling

 * ✅ - Process through all (useful) pain points from the Dev/Deploy review session
 * on-going - Integrate HHVM support into our deployment systems
 * ✅ - start the scap(py) & trebuchet integration conversation (strech goal)

Beta cluster

 * ✅ - Support HHVM in Beta Cluster
 * on-going - Swift cluster in beta (strecth goal)

MediaWiki Release

 * ✅ - Successfully support the release of MediaWiki 1.23
 * ✅ - Kickoff/complete second RFP
 * on-going - Investigate and create useful release/deployment metrics visualizations (stretch goal)

Browser tests

 * (From last quarter) Use tags to run builds appropriate to released versions (e.g. don't run master build on test2wiki)
 * ✅ - Retire Cloudbees Jenkins instance
 * ✅ - Integrate WMF Jenkins with new WMF SauceLabs account
 * ✅ - Use API to create test data at runtime more widely
 * Used by MobileFrontend
 * Used by VisualEditor
 * Used by smoke tests
 * ✅ - Add browsertests to new repos
 * GettingStarted

Hiring

 * ✅ - Complete hiring for Release Engineer
 * ✅ - Complete hiring for Automation Engineer (Ruby)

Questions
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Action Items
from notes