Quality Assurance/Guide to getting started

a quick guide to getting started testing:

First, you should understand our shared public test environments. Those are:
 * http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/
 * http://test2.wikipedia.org

You should also be aware of
 * http://commons.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org and how to upload images and other media files.

Make yourself an account on these wikis. Visit your Preferences, understand what you can do on these wikis. Take a look at Special:Version on them.

The beta labs wikis are running code that is automatically updated to the latest version of the master branch for both Mediawiki itself and all the extensions on the wiki. Beta labs is our main test environment, and most activity is centered there.

The test2 wiki is running the latest deployment branch. The code there is at most one week away from being deployed to production wikis. Use this environment both for pre-deploy testing and also for testing that requires the most realistic environment: test2wiki is a node on the production cluster, a peer wiki to English Wikipedia and all the other wikis.

You should understand our deployment schedule at Deployment

Second, you should become familiar with this wiki ( or "mw.o"), we keep all of our documentation about software, process, etc.).

Do some searching on mw.o. Look at the recent changes. Get a feel for how things are done.

Third, you should get on IRC.

As you become familiar with these resources, feel free to ask questions on this QA mailing list and on the IRC channel

Once people are a bit more familiar with where to go and how things are arranged, we can talk in more detail about today's testing activities and about the testing we'll be doing in the near future.