[QA] heuristic for testing VisualEditor with ULS and Selenium

Chris McMahon cmcmahon at wikimedia.org
Thu Sep 5 22:23:20 UTC 2013


When you click 'Edit' on a wiki page in Firefox or Chrome to invoke
VisualEditor, the editable area is called "CE" for contentEditable.  After
you make changes, the diff you can see before the final save is called "DM"
for "data model".

It is vitally important that the data held in CE and DM always be identical
for any edit.  If CE and DM do not agree, then saving the edit corrupts the
data on the page.  For example, with the help of an automated test I was
able to demonstrate a race condition causing exactly this problem not long
ago, which resulted in an emergency fix release:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53360

This week Rachel was working on an automated VE test and hit a problem
because of how Selenium and Firefox interpret the difference between
"enter" and "return" commands:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53721.  In this case we were
unable to reproduce the error manually, but it makes me suspect that there
may be some hardware or software somewhere such that creating a newline
while using VisualEditor to edit CE will cause DM to not recognize the
changed page contents.

One of the things that ULS makes possible is a choice of "input methods".
 The more we can have people checking the results of various input methods
(hardware and software) in VisualEditor the happier we will be.   Rachel's
experience shows that a newline from an exotic input source *might* be a
cause of data corruption in VE, but we have to demonstrate the problem
reliably by a manual operation in order to address it.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/qa/attachments/20130905/55f5c595/attachment.html>


More information about the QA mailing list