[QA] QA: new mail list, update from Amsterdam, etc.

[Chris McMahon]

Because of a surge of interest in recent times, we have started a mail list
for QA activities connected with WMF projects.  If this interests you, feel
free to sign up at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/qa. The
list is completely open, so also feel free to mention it to anyone else for
whom this sort of discussion might be of interest.

Below is a sample of the sort of things we will discuss on the QA list:

OPW:
Congratulations Rachel Thomas (rachel99) on being selected to work on
browser test automation with us as part of the Gnome FOSS Outreach Program
for Women.  Rachel has been a volunteer for some time now and despite
starting from scratch with gerrit and Ruby/Cucumber/PageObject has already
made valuable contributions to the browser tests.  We're really looking
forward to working with Rachel over the summer.

Amsterdam Hackathon:
While Željko and Chris have met any number of times before, this was our
first meeting outside of the USA.  Together we cleaned up many failing
builds at https://wmf.ci.cloudbees.com/; we implemented some tests for the
Universal Language Selector; and we gave a presentation on the current
state of the browser tests to a number of interested (and interesting!)
people.

In the course of making the builds green, we:

* updated the Guided Tour test to reflect the latest behavior of that
feature
* repaired a bogus error message from parallel_cucumber causing false build
failure reports
* adjusted the target test environments among beta labs enwiki and commons,
test2wiki, and production to yield optimum coverage with a minimum of red
builds.


We also extended some test coverage:
* checked in a test for Appearances and Datetime Preferences
* checked in an interim fix for sidebar expand/collapse tests while we
explore setting cookies in IE
* wrote a new test for Universal Language Selector based on some work from
Runa Bhattacharjee of the Language team, and planned for more ULS tests
very soon. (Fixing
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45958will be helpful)

In the very near future we'll be working with tests for VisualEditor as
well, which continues to have some interesting bugs:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48166.  Bug 48166 and a few
others were identified as part of a community test exercise at the Telerik
Test Summit peer confernence in Austin TX not long ago.

We are also looking forward to using YuviPanda's new github-gerrit
integration.

Again, we extend an invitation to anyone interested in testing, test
automation, and QA activities in general to join the mail list at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/qa

-Chris McMahon
QA Lead for WMF
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