Development process improvement/2014-01-22/Pain points

Being Processed

• Status:    Done - security patches (on list)
• Status:    Done - SWAT team
• Status:    Done - config changes not being deployed after merge (on list)
  • https://rt.wikimedia.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=7427
• Status:    in-progress - WMF product should be consulted on some shellbugs

From notes

Inter-team Collaboration

• Product review doesn't always happen
• Getting security review can take a long time
• WMF product should be consulted on some shellbugs

Task/Bug/Story tracking

• Keeping non-Bugzilla tracking systems (Mingle/Trello) synced with Bugzilla is hard
• Sometimes shellbug requests bypass bugzilla
• How do we know that a shellbug request has consensus

Deployment software and configuration (eg: scap, sartoris)

• Security patches don't always get reapplied when extensions are redeployed
• Beta cluster can be broken by a production config change
• External software dependencies keep some software from riding the train

Deployment process/cultural norms

• People sometimes merge wmfconfig changes without deploying
• Some teams/products don't ride the train
• Error apathy. Lots of known bugs that nobody is fixing ("Meh. That error is always there or ignore it")
• Time between merge and release branch cut can be 1m to 1w.
• "Minor" changes deployed outside windows
• Sometimes people deploy during reserved deploy windows that they don't own
• Need for backwards compatibility with schema changes limits velocity
• Instrumentation is not sufficent for continuous deployment
• Bug fixes don't roll out quickly enough

(automated) Testing

• Unit test coverage is inadequate across features and projects.
  • Browser/full stack tests are effective, but we rely on them too much
    • Our "test pyramid" is upside-down: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TestPyramid.html .
• No facility for pre-merge full stack tests
• Browser tests are slow (and always will be, even at their fastest)
  • And Cloudbees is flaky, and lots of other known problems with browser tests. See: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Browser_testing/architecture
• We don't test integration across repos at branch cut time (extensions with core, config with extensions; not an easy task)
  • Could run browser tests on branch cut. Integration/API tests would be useful.
• Labs configuration is not like production
• Setting up a complex wiki environment in Labs is often manual/difficult
• Can't easily run automated browser tests against Vagrant. Improvements to this in process now: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58939
• Bootstrapping a wiki on Vagrant isn't automated

Other

• No official Vagrant maintainer
• Gerrit's workflow is "not like github"