Quality Assurance/Status 2012-2014

Last update on: 2013-02-05

2012-06-monthly
This month saw a big focus on hiring the QA Engineer and Volunteer QA Coordinator. We also continued to be focused on testing Article Feedback (including via an event on IRC with OpenHatch and new testing volunteers), and are working to get beta labs fit for use as a test environment for AFT and Editor Engagement (E2).

2012-07-monthly
Hiring a QA Engineer remains a high priority. Article Feedback Version 5 is now on 5% of Wikipedia, with a plan in place to increase that percentage over the summer. AFTv5 is being praised highly by the Wikipedia community, although a small number of power users are experiencing a particular problem. We isolated that problem and have a potential fix in place for deployment July 24. Work on the labs beta cluster continues, with AFT and TimedMediaHandler first priorities and the Editor Engagement project to follow. No community test events are planned right now, although the groundwork is in place for community test events related to Bugzilla tickets for Extensions and to the Visual Editor.

2012-08-24
This month saw an emphasis on hiring, with excellent candidates currently being considered for all the positions with close relation to QA. With AFTv5 in place in production, testing focus shifted to NewPagesFeed and Page Curation Toolbar. Due to conflicts of holidays, vacations, time of year, meetings, and general complications we decided not to hold an explicit community test event for NewPageFeed/Curation, but test environments and a test plan will be available for those interested to explore this new feature. Finally, an exciting announcement about the beta labs test environment is imminent, but not yet quite final. 

2012-08-monthly
This month saw an emphasis on hiring, with excellent candidates soon to be hired for all the positions that will be closely related to QA. With AFTv5 in place in production, testing focus shifted to NewPagesFeed and Page Curation Toolbar. Due to conflicts of holidays, vacations, time of year, meetings, and general complications, we decided not to hold an explicit community test event for NewPagesFeed/Curation, but test environments and a test plan will be available for those interested to explore this new feature. NOTE: announcement for QA Engineer and possibly Mobile QA will have been made by the time this is published.

2012-09-06
Barring unforeseen circumstances and after examining many hundreds of applicants, hiring of final candidates for the open positions closely tied to QA (QA Engineer, Mobile QA Engineer, Volunteer Community Coordinator, Bug Wrangler) should all be complete within days. These new hires will greatly accelerate QA work in the near future. On the testing front, several key extensions are now being deployed automatically to the beta labs test environment, with AFTv5 to be the first key extension fully hosted on on beta in order to retire the prototype test host, which has become obsolete. This month also saw a renewed focus on browser test automation with the creation of an automated test for the UploadWizard extension being used by both QA and at least one WMF developer. This work will be extended and refined by the new QA Engineer in the very near future.

2012-09-monthly
Barring unforeseen circumstances and after examining many hundreds of applicants, hiring of final candidates for the open positions closely tied to QA (QA Engineer, Mobile QA Engineer, Volunteer Community Coordinator, Bug Wrangler) should all be complete within days. These new hires will greatly accelerate QA work in the near future. On the testing front, several key extensions are now being deployed automatically to the beta labs test environment, with AFTv5 to be the first key extension fully hosted on on beta in order to retire the prototype test host, which has become obsolete. This month also saw a renewed focus on browser test automation with the creation of an automated test for the UploadWizard extension being used by both QA and at least one WMF developer. This work will be extended and refined by the new QA Engineer in the very near future.

2012-10-monthly
Newly hired Michelle Glover and Željko Filipin will be testing software and working on browser-level test automation for both mobile and web platforms. Željko has particular expertise in automated testing and will be joining Antoine Musso and Timo Tijhof in the Netherlands for a "Continuous Integration Summit" in conjunction with Wikimedia Nederland Hackathon 2012.

2012-11-06
Grover was at the Mobile test summit, and has plunged into Perfecto device testing for mobile (a 3rd-party service that lets you test real devices over the internet). As of tomorrow, Filipin is going to NL to talk about CI, Labs, Jenkins, etc. In the meantime, Grover and McMahon are discussing making some mobile tests happen.

2012-11-13
<section begin="2012-11-13"/>Creating backlog of tests to be automated. Working with Quim and Michelle on potential first institutional community QA project. <section end="2012-11-13"/>

2012-11-monthly
<section begin="2012-11-monthly"/>The team contributed to the community QA draft strategy and presented the Acceptance Test-Driven Development concept to Wikimedia Product/Project managers. Regression testing of software deployments is ongoing.<section end="2012-11-monthly"/>

2012-12-18
<section begin="2012-12-18"/>Announcement of browser test status to wikitech-l successful. Proposals to form Features testing and Browser testing Mediawiki groups in place. Publicizing those. Regression testing of software deployments is ongoing, including first release of Echo to mediawiki.org.<section end="2012-12-18"/>

2013-01-22
<section begin="2013-01-22"/>Examining opportunities for community testing events, possibly monthly. Echo, AFTv5, and Visual Editor are all current candidates for testing, with VE likely for late January or early February.<section end="2013-01-22"/>

2013-01-29
<section begin="2013-01-29"/>Public test event for VisualEditor is underway. At least one major issue identified causing data loss, and another issue identified with tool-assisted Chinese input, with more to come. <section end="2013-01-29"/>

2013-01-monthly
<section begin="2013-01-monthly"/>We started to schedule opportunities for community testing events. Echo, AFTv5, and VisualEditor are all current candidates for testing. A week-long focus on VisualEditor's support for non-Latin characters uncovered at least one major issue causing data loss, and another one with tool-assisted Chinese input. <section end="2013-01-monthly"/>

2013-02-05
<section begin="2013-02-05"/>Test event for Visual Editor concluded successfully, as we identified at least five important software issues and added at least one volunteer tester from the professional software testing community. However, we got fewer testers from the Wikimedia community than desired. Planning for upcoming test events is underway and we are working on improving the effectiveness of our Wikimedia community outreach. <section end="2013-02-05"/>