Selenium/Ruby/Browser testing

Rationale
It's tedious to manually test Wikimedia sites within the thousands of browser/operating system combinations that are out there, so we do automated testing to find errors and assure quality.

We use Cucumber because it lets you write tests in plain English; you don't need to know Ruby. Cucumber implements an idea called Acceptance Test Driven Development. The plain English test specifications open a communication channel with non-technical people who wish to contribute to browser test automation.

Timeline
See QA/Roadmap.

How to contribute
Contributing to Browser testing may take several forms


 * Write feature descriptions in plain English. Technical experience is NOT required. Currently this is our foremost need.
 * Run automated browser tests locally.
 * Analyzing test results and reporting failures discovered by way of Jenkins
 * Contribute to the backlog of tests to be automated.

If you are interested in automated browser tests, join the proposed MediaWiki Group Browser testing.

Resources

 * Current test results.
 * Browser test source code in Gerrit, mirrored at GitHub.
 * Test plan: see the backlog of tests to be automated.
 * We use given-when-then testing format.