Wikimedia Release Engineering Team/Quarterly review, August 2013

Date: August 21st, 2013

Time: 1:30pm Pacific (20:30 UTC)

Who: Topics: Deploy process/pipeline, release process, bug fixing, code review, code management, security deploy/release, automation prioritization
 * Leads: Greg G, Chris M
 * Virtual team: Greg G, Chris M, Antoine, Sam, Chris S, Chad, Zeljko, Michelle G, Andre, Ariel
 * Other review participants (invited): Robla, Sumana, Quim, Maryana, James F, Ryan Lane, Ken, Terry, Tomasz, Alolita

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

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
 * Reduce time between code being finished and being deployed, while finding issues with code earlier and with more certainty.
 * Provide information about software quality in a way that informs release decisions
 * Help WMF Engineering learn and adapt from experience

...All in an effort to pave the path to a more continuous deployment environment.

Team roles
Many people outside of the virtual team play an important role in releases, but this review will focus on the work of the following people in the following roles:
 * Release engineering: Greg G, Sam, Chris S (security)
 * QA and Test Automation: Chris M, Zeljko, Michelle G,
 * Bug escalation: Andre, Greg G., Chris M, Chris S (security)
 * Beta cluster development/maintenance:  Antoine, Ariel, Sam
 * Development tools (e.g. Gerrit, Jenkins): Chad, Antoine

What we've done

 * Built the Beta Cluster to be something that is instrumental in the quality of our code production
 * all platform and extension code merged to master is deployed to beta labs automatically
 * automated db updates are still under discussion but greatly improved
 * Provided embedded QA support to important feature teams (Language and Mobile)
 * Successfully transitioned to a one-week deploy cycle
 * Community growth through eg OPW, live and online training sessions, QA mail list
 * Virtual team creation

Still in progress

 * Proper support for all extensions in beta cluster https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49846
 * Break browser tests out of catch-all /qa/browsertests and into per-feature builds, following the Mobile model. CirrusSearch, ULS, VE https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52890 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52120

Goals for the next quarter
We have a lot - see also, the list of sprints with associated tracking tickets
 * Better align QA effort with high profile features
 * see: QA testing levels describing test events
 * Apply model of Language/Mobile embedded QA to a new feature team (specifically VisualEditor)
 * Include more user contributed code testing (eg: Gadgets)
 * Increase capacity through community training for browser tests
 * Improve our deployment process
 * automate as much as possible
 * improve monitoring
 * improve tooling (eg: atomic updates/rollbacks and cache invalidation)
 * Take the Beta Cluster to the next level
 * monitoring of fatals, errors, performance
 * add more automated tests for eg the API
 * feed experiences/gained knowledge of Beta Cluster automation up to production automation

Stretch activities as time allows

 * Provide hermetic test environments for developers/testers/community. Vagrant shows the way.
 * Use Vagrant for targeted tests withing the WMF Jenkins work flow

Measures of success

 * Successfully integrate QA support in one more feature team (as defined by: more regular/predictable testing and more test coverage)
 * The Beta Cluster has an equal amount of monitoring to that of production (just without the paging to Ops).
 * eg: we have sufficient monitoring that pertinent team members know when the Beta Cluster is down
 * We are able to quickly spin up throw-away browser testing sessions per merge to master.

Questions

 * What does Product Management and QA commuication look like?
 * There's a lot to do, where should we prioritize? Where should we build capacity?
 * Sign off for bigger feature deploys/enablings?
 * Is how we plan on measuring success sufficient for your needs?

Worries

 * Our goals are wide-ranging and need support from multiple teams, maybe moreso than your average goal list