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Mobile web/Etherpad/2013-2014 Q2 Mobile web meetings

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2013-2014 Q2 Mobile web discussions, 19 September 2013

Agenda

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  • Quarterly retrospective
  • Brainstorm topics for discussion
  • Discussion about deployments
  • Discussion about QA/code coverage
  • Discussions around top brainstormed topics


Retrospective

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What worked?

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  • We have Echo, Editing and all sorts of things yey!
  • bingle
  • naming iterations
  • Kenan and Maryana's transition :)
  • trolling arthur+++
  • Arthur's month long vacation didn't seem to have a huge negative impact (except for making it harder to get code review for Max)
  • Taking care of many bugs
  • HTMLFormatter stuff
  • Responding well to bugs - could be even clearer
  • Good data instrumentation
  • Strong excitement across org
  • Remote work support
  • Now have more people who can deploy (+documentation)
  • volunteer patch! \o/

What didn't?

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  • visibility of alpha/beta features - some we just forgot about - Alpha as a place for features to bitrot+++++++ [Jon]
  • bingle could do more for me - resolving duplicates, backlogging enhancements, transitions +++ [Arthur]
  • Didn't QA editing across projects - generally QA'ing across many projects that are not enwiki +++ [Michelle]
  • communicating with ops / cross team working +++ [Arthur/Erik M]
  • Documentation is hard to find [Kaldari]
  • Bugs that are actually stories++
  • lost momentum with Wikimania / All staff - lots of collaboration happened though +
  • felt a bit overloaded by design discussions + ^ (same as above?)
  • some lower priority but important code maintenance patches rotted/died (minerva, ajax page loading alpha)
  • writing stories for the sake of stories
  • certain stories felt like they could only be achieved by Max which is somewhat worrying
  • our velocity graphs look totally f'd+
  • Could've fixed more bugs +
  • Could get even better abour communicating to rest of org

What still puzzles us?

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  • How screwed are we if Max gets sick? get Arthur to do less scrum mastery:P
  • how do we solve the thank trolling problem
  • Should all features put into beta have eventlogging built in as a precondition
  • How do we attract more volunteer developers
  • if we wontfix something how we can stop someone from reopening it..?!
  • Features in alpha, beta, promoted to stable
  • Browser support +++

Agenda brainstorm

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  • Browser support / die WAP die++++++
  • Performance is a feature++++++
  • Moving more code to core (less custom code)+++++
  • Involving the community more++
  • Alpha / Beta+

Browser support

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  • WAP support on site, but we spend no dev time on it and do not test it
    • bug today about popular WAP browser not supporting proto-relative URLs
    • Max wants to drop WAP support
      • Need updated #s for Zero WAP usage
    • Current WAP detection doesn't make any sense; only real solution is to come up with a full list of browsers that can't handle our HTML but that sucks because we'd need to test on a bagillion low-end devices
  • https://www.dropbox.com/s/840ftlrfygtou4m/browser-stats-mobile-20130610-20130616.zip
  • What does support vs not support mean? Do we test on all those browsers?
    • Don't support: We don't test, if we get bugs they are marked 'wontfix'
    • Support: Good faith effort to fix bugs
  • Would be nice to be able to drop a user-agent header into a form and see the % of usage
  • Maybe three levels of support: reader support, editor support, non-critical support
  • Kenan will work on getting list of browsers and % of traffic
    • Juliusz wants to make sure some engineers are involved in defining whether we support or not
      • Browsers can be grouped in different ways, see the above link for examples, e.g. sometimes Android 4 != Android 4 because 4.0 has a bug that 4.1 doesn't
  • But usage needs to be considered in a way sliced globally
    • a browser that has 1% worldwide traffic might have 30% traffic in developing targeted countries
    • Need communication with Zero team
  • Issues following standards, particularly with WAP/WML

Action!

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  • Kenan will get better data; update browser support per quarter based on qualitative AND quantitiative metrics; decide how we'll provide testing coverage; if bugs come in for 'supported' browsers we make good-faith effort to fix otherwise wontfix
  • Do we support WAP now? Kenan will get numbers and we'll make a decision asap

Performance

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Action

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  • Kenan's going to talk to other PMs etc for benchmarking
  • Kenan's going to define spike(s) for finding our benchmarks
  • Juliusz will continue working with Ori around navtiming etc

QA/code coverage

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  • figure out where we need to add aditional unit tests
  • determine code coverage for PHP/JS and ensure that it's being reviewed before we begin working on sepcific code areas
  • don't want to do arbitrary tests, rather informed tests that are meaningful
  • we'll be guineapigs/trail blazers for these tools
  • high expectations for unit tests around core code
  • Selenium tests?
    • We get notifications; there's a wiki page on what's covered
    • how are selenium tests defined? in response to bugs, previous breakage
    • have engineers start writing selenium tests? yes, but lower priority than getting a handle on unit tests

Action

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  • Michelle to get us metrics around code coverage
  • Juliusz to give workshop around TDD (acceptance (selenium) tests, followed by unit tests, followed by code to make the tests pass)
  • Michelle to work with one of the engineers for finding the right JS-related tool for code coverage

Deplyoment train

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  • blocked on testing on testwiki
  • betalabs nowhere near stable
  • mobile focussed produciton-like vagrant instance? (standard for eveyrone to test against, easy for new devs to get started, we control it rather than having no control over betalabs)
  • get mobile domain working for test2

Action

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  • Michelle to coordinate with Chris about tests for test2
  • Need to get test2 to work with MF, then get on the train and see what happens (keep our window) [Arthur]

Code -> core

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  • Currently have patchset around moving HTMLFormatter stuff to core, but blocked on comments
    • Max will prod this along
  • Other: HTML templates in JS (Hogan), wikitext-parsed messages in JS, some abstractions we use in JS (View?)
    • Clean up RL related code as part of code hygiene so it's ready to integration
    • Allow core migration convo to happen organically
  • Mobile detection in core? There's not a lot of detection logic anymore...
    • X-WAP header is still kinda wonky...
    • Should be done, but it is low priority
  • Use mediawiki.ui or stick with our own styles? Wait for Less support?
    • If we decide to use mediawiki.ui, make it thinner and not dependent on jQuery.UI
      • It's not dependent on jQuery.ui, but could always use some thinning

Action

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  • Max to keep prodding HTMLFormatter patchsets
  • Focus on cleaning up RL related code to be ready for potential migration [Jon]


Involving community

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  • Alpha/beta/stable scaring away potential contributors?
  • Gerrit scaring away new contributors?
  • Jon wants to attract new contributors (folks who've never contributed to MW code before)
  • Create a 'how to get started' page for MobileFrontend
    • Have a 'hello world' module
  • Add 'developers' link in footer?
  • Have a vagrant instance or instances (one for WM infrastructure, one for basic dev)

Action

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  • Kaldari to own putting together documentation for getting started
  • Arthur to continue pushing WM prod vagrant instance for MF
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