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Engineering Community Team/Meetings/2013-04-30

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30 April 2013

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Browser testing by dev teams. What is the status and how to focus volunteer efforts?

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The Summer of Code mentors say that automated browser tests are not eligible for GSoC. Prejudice against it because people think it is "janitorial". Ongoing debate regarding whether it is "creative" enough, and some people argue it should simply be PART of development tasks but we shouldn't allow projects that are JUST abou writing automated browser tests.

  • But are our teams creating their own automated browser tests?
    • Chris M: Ori & Chris Steipp working with QA to write user stories, tests for global login. Similar conversations with E3 & Features, UW .... but we need scenarios.
      • But shouldn't this just be part of the dev process?
  • What if a lot of people in the community we are trying to recruit also see this as a janitorial thing and thus don't want to do it because devs should?

Rob: we should pursue this conversation in a larger venue (wikitech-l?) but also pursue our current strategy with vigor

  • In our codebase, we have ~10 years of functionality that we do not have a dev team to turn to in order to document with tests
  • Even for new stuff, a lot is written by volunteers. If those volunteers don't feel inclined to write browser tests, we gotta find other vols to write them
  • One appeal of our current framework: Ruby-based! For devs who don't want to learn PHP but want to contribute, espec if they know some Ruby, this is great opportunity!

Chris:

  • We don't have a standard dev practice at WMF
  • Because of past failures we have resistance, so Chris wants to show value to get appreciation
  • Emphasis should be on PM/features/scenarios/stories right now
  • Automated browser testing is a discipline unto itself with its own design principles, often handled in Enterprise shops by dedicated SDET types (Software Development Engineer in Test) not by line programmers. Line programmers handle unit tests.

Sumana:

  • Quim will work on the OPW side this week
  • OPW intern(s) will help focus & make infrastructure for this (as Valerie & Mariya's internships did)
  • check in more next week

GSoC/OPW

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All in all, ok; we could have gotten more noncoding projects next time - talk to more movement bodies, departments to get marketing, documentation, art, etc. ideas/mentors?

Quarterly goals

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https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2012-13_Goals#Wikimedia_technical_community

  • Continuing responsibilities, including more online events for the QA community as appropriate - done. We did bug triages.
  • Three online or in-person QA trainings for the community -- we did some one-on-one trainings, and the first group testing activity was a training. So, done.
  • Summer mentorship outreach, planning, and rampup - done
  • Spring semester mentorship (Outreach Program for Women) administration - done
  • Code review trainings - morphed into security training. We did 1. - partly done -- following up on implications
  • Possibly strong presence at FOSDEM, incl. dev room - done.
  • Regular BugSquad meetings and activities fall into a rhythm - done. we have them every other week, have some volunteers, want more. We have a bugsquad but people are reluctant to ID themselves because it leads to expectations. Let's not worry too much about labels. We can just look at weekly stats. Good to have a page but we don't need to put people in uniforms with numbers. On Wikipedia you see some people love putting up userboxen, some don't, that's okay
  • Formalize community testing across WMF mobile projects - done. We collaborated on 1 activity, they did 1 themselves.
  • Next week: look at this quarter's goals in depth.
TODO - Re code review trainings -- if we're concentrating on this to help WMF engineering, then we should get help from HR? Sumana to send note to Erik
TODO - work with mobile team to see why and how they have been successful, document, replicate

Movement-wide awareness

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Deryck Chan's resignation email: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-April/125498.html

  • A reminder to us that most Wikimedia volunteers have little experience in organizational admin and we should be flexible and lenient in what we ask of them

One response from a community member in Norway: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-April/125557.html

  • Genuinely partnering with other movement bodies is not just nice for outreach, it's also useful for morale. But we cannot scale to have personal relationships with 40+ chapters/thematic orgs/user groups.

So what should we do, as ECT? Some options:

  1. Take a moment to look over https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters , https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Thematic_Organizations , and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_User_Groups every once in a while to keep apprised of who's forming associations. Sumana explains: How do we reach out to them and make use of these user groups to help us reach our goals; We should a least know about who they are
  2. Guillaume & Quim to look at them, potentially pick a few (3?) movement bodies to try to liaise with towards ECT's goals. (example: Journalism?)
  3. Be willing to coach a few? (?)

Misc

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Vacations, conferences, etc.

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Schedule Amsterdam, OSBridge, Wikimania travel soon! For Amsterdam: Talk with Doreen & cc Sumana

  • Guillaume afk the afternoon of this Friday (May 3rd); possibly a couple days off in early July
  • Andre:
    • Public holidays in CZ on May Wed01, May Wed08
    • will visit WMDE@Berlin on May 2/3.
    • Holidays (BE/NL) May Mon20-Thu23 -- any replacement available? Quim maybe? I'll be here--Quim
  • Sumana
    • a little vacation before & after Amsterdam
    • Wed & Fri May 15 & 17 off
  • Quim vaguely thinking on some holidays in July. Specific dates coming soon.
  • Željko:
    • May 1, holiday in Croatia
    • May 15-17, DORS/CLUC 2013, Zagreb, Croatia (talk accepted!)
    • May 18-23, vacation, Amsterdam, Netherlands
    • May 24-26, Wikimedia Hackathon, Amsterdam, Netherlands
    • June 10-12, Selenium Conference, Boston, MA, USA
    • August 16-18, eurucamp, Berlin, Germany (maybe, waiting for reply if my talk is accepted)
    • September 6-7, BalCCon, Novi Sad, Serbia (maybe, waiting for reply if my talk is accepted)
  • Chris:
    • May 2-5 (Telerik Test Summit Peer Conference, Austin TX)
    • May 13-17 relocating

, details TBD

    • May 24-26, Wikimedia Hackathon, Amsterdam, Netherlands
    • Aug 4-10 Agile2013 - "radically open software testing"
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