Quality Assurance/When to use QA services

Wikimedia Foundation's QA department concentrates on exploratory testing and on automated browser testing.

Exploratory testing
Exploratory Testing is critical investigation of software by informed humans. ET produces reports and questions about behavior that may or may not be correct, anticipated, or by design.

Some sorts of features are particularly amenable to ET:


 * When the feature has user-facing/UI components
 * When the feature is required to work in multiple browsers
 * When the feature is not just a single page, but requires workflow and navigation through possible paths
 * When usability and user experience (UX) is important

Some times in the software development cycle are particularly amenable to ET:

For more, see Features testing.
 * When the feature is considered more stable than unstable
 * Before the feature is released to a wide audience
 * When the development team is in a position to make changes and improvements to the feature based on feedback from testing

Browser testing
Automated testing is writing and maintaining code that checks whether a feature performs as desired. We specifically write and automate browser tests that automatically look for regressions in multiple browsers using Selenium, and report errors to Jenkins.

Some sorts of features are particularly amenable to browser testing: Some times in the software development cycle are particularly amenable to browser testing:
 * When the feature has user-facing/UI components
 * When the feature is required to work in multiple browsers
 * When a particular string is guaranteed as an outcome
 * When the feature is considered more stable than unstable
 * When regressions are a substantial worry
 * When the development team does not anticipate making sweeping changes to string messages
 * When the development team is in a position to make changes and improvements to the feature based on feedback from testing
 * When the development team is in a position to learn how to write and maintain browser tests themselves