Wikimedia Release Engineering Team/Quarterly review, August 2014

Date: September 3rd | Time: 17:00 UTC | Slides | Notes

Topics: Deploy process and pipeline; browser, manual, and unit testing; everything from development to deployment.

Team[edit]

Who[edit]

Lead: Greg
Team: Antoine, Chris, Dan, Mukunda, Rummana, Sam, Zeljko

Big picture[edit]

Release Engineering is where our code quality efforts can be amplified. When we do things well, we start to see more responsive development with higher quality code. That is our mission.

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, especially test environments and pre-deployment
Reduce time between code being merged and being deployed
Provide information about software quality in a way that informs development and release decisions
Help WMF Engineering learn and adapt from experience

Team roles[edit]

Phabricator: Mukunda
Deployment tooling1: Sam, Mukunda
Jenkins/Zuul: Antoine, Zeljko
Beta cluster development/maintenance: Antoine
Automated browser tests: Chris M, Zeljko
Manual browser testing: Rummana, +1
Vagrant: Dan

Previous Quarter Review[edit]

Deployment tooling[edit]

Done - Process through all (useful) pain points from the Dev/Deploy review session
on-going - Integrate HHVM support into our deployment systems
Done - start the scap(py) & trebuchet integration conversation (strech goal)

Beta cluster[edit]

Done - Support HHVM in Beta Cluster
on-going - Swift cluster in beta (strecth goal)

MediaWiki Release[edit]

Done - Successfully support the release of MediaWiki 1.23
Done - Kickoff/complete second RFP
on-going - Investigate and create useful release/deployment metrics visualizations (stretch goal)

Browser tests[edit]

on-going - Use tags to run builds appropriate to released versions (e.g. don't run master build on test2wiki)
Done - Retire Cloudbees Jenkins instance
Done - Integrate WMF Jenkins with new WMF SauceLabs account
Done - Use API to create test data at runtime more widely
- Used by MobileFrontend
- Used by VisualEditor
- Used by smoke tests
Done - Add browsertests to new repos
- GettingStarted

Hiring[edit]

Done - Complete hiring for Release Engineer
Done - Complete hiring for Automation Engineer (Ruby)

Next Quarter[edit]

Phabricator[edit]

Mukunda

Migration from Bugzilla completed
- Be an example early adopter of features
Migration from Trello/Mingle started
Migration from Gerrit completed (pending unforeseen issues)

metrics

Number of team migrated to Phabricator vs number of teams using Trello/Mingle right now

Deployment tooling[edit]

Sam, Mukunda

scap(py) & trebuchet integration
- how much and what it looks like TBD, some from the requirements doc
increasing bus factor (important due to new hires/team changes)

Jenkins[edit]

Antoine, Zeljko

Jenkins performance improvements
- performance is suffereing as it controls more and more tasks, causing many false failures.
- provisioning more slaves is one aspect of this
maintenance and new test infrastructure requests (ongoing)

Beta cluster[edit]

Antoine, Dan, Sam

Add new services (-oids)
Swift cluster (remove NFS)
Beta Cluster monitoring (baseline)
Yet Another Cluster

metrics

Real data and graphs from monitoring services

Browser tests[edit]

Chris, Zeljko, Dan

Workshops/trainings in lieu of one-to-one pair programming
Improved "best practices" and "getting started" documentation
Continued pairing with WMF Engineering teams
Begin pairing with the Flow team
Environment abstraction layer in mediawiki-selenium to allow for less fragile and more advanced step definitions

metrics

tracking state of browser tests before Thursday branch cut

days since last green build, per Jenkins job

note that the biggest factor in false failures today is poor performance from Jenkins (see above)

Vagrant[edit]

Dan

Wrap up pairing with MobileFrontend
Better browser test runner, eg "vagrant run-browser-tests"
Investigate creating shareable vagrant- or docker-based test environments
Optimize memory hungry services running in the vagrant VM (reduce base memory usage)

metrics

qualitative survey of WMF teams on their use of Vagrant

number of/percentage of WMF production deployed extensions available in Vagrant

Hiring[edit]

Greg, Chris

Complete hiring for QA Tester

Questions[edit]

from notes

Action Items[edit]

from notes:

add value statement with each goal in next quarter's presentation
create RFC around deployment systems
Rob/Greg/Rummana/Chris team discussion about scripted testing, especially with new QA Tester starting
revisit/discuss role of scripted testing vs exploratory testing at next quarterly review
Greg to bring up use case for bare metal test cluster