At the developer's conference in Berlin this past
spring, the void that
is current our testing procedures was a common topic of conversation.
Put simply, QA is not exciting work for most people and our
volunteer-oriented development process tends to result in very little or
often no automated QA. We do have other ways of reviewing code, but
until we have a staff QA person (which could happen in the near future)
it's unlikely that this will change much.
That is, unless, all of a sudden, all of our volunteers get all excited
about QA work and pitch in on developing and participating in a more
robust QA process.
- Trevor
On 7/16/09 8:55 AM, dan nessett wrote:
I have never been a QA engineer. However, it
doesn't require great experience to see that the MW software development process is
broken. I provide the following comments not in a destructive spirit. The success of the
MW software is obvious. However, in my view unless the development process introduces some
QA procedures, the code eventually will collapse and its reputation will degrade.
My interest in MW (the software, not the organization) is driven by a desire to provide
an enhancement in the form of an extension. So, I began by building a small development
environment on my machine (a work in progress). Having developed software for other
organizations, I intuitively sought out what I needed in terms of testing in order to
provide a good quality extension. This meant I needed to develop unit tests for my
extension and also to perform regression testing on the main code base after installing
it. Hence some of my previous questions to this email list.
It soon became apparent that the MW development process has little or no testing
procedures. Sure, there are the parser tests, but I couldn't find any requirement that
developers had to run them before submitting patches.
Out of curiosity, I decided to download 1.16a (r52088), use the LocalSettings file from
my local installation (1.14) and run some parser tests. This is not a scientific
experiment, since the only justification for using these extensions in the tests is I had
them installed in my personal wiki. However, there is at least one thing to learn from
them. The results are:
Mediawiki 52088 Parser Tests
Extensions : 1) Nuke, 2) Renameuser, 3) Cite, 4) ParserFunctions, 5) CSS Style Sheets, 6)
ExpandTemplates, 7) Gadgets, 8) Dynamic Page List, 9) Labeled Section Transclusion. The
last extension has 3 require_once files: a) lst.php, b) lsth.php, and c) compat.php.
Test Extensions ParserTests Test Fails
1 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 19
2 1 14
3 2 14
4 3 14
5 4 14
6 5 14
7 6 14
8 7 14
9 8 14
10 9 (abc) 19
11 9 (a) 18
12 9 (ab) 19
13 1,2,3,4,6,7 14
Note that the extension that introduces all of the unexpected parser test failures is
Labeled Section Transclusion. According to its documentation, it is installed on
*.wikisource.org,
test.wikipedia.org, and
en.wiktionary.org.
I am new to this development community, but my guess is since there are no testing
requirements for extensions, its author did not run parser tests before publishing it. (I
don't mean to slander him and I am open to the correction that it ran without
unexpected errors on the MW version he tested against.)
This rather long preamble leads me to the point of this email. The MW software
development process needs at least some rudimentary QA procedures. Here are some thoughts
on this. I offer these to initiate debate on this issue, not as hard positions.
* Before a developer commits a patch to the code base, he must run parser tests against
the change. The patch should not be committed if it increases the number of parser test
failures. He should document the results in the bugzilla bug report.
* If a developer commits a patch without running parser tests or commits a patch that
increases the number of parser test failures, he should be warned. If he does this another
time with some time interval (say 6 months), his commit privileges are revoked for some
period of time (say 6 months). The second time he becomes a candidate for commit privilege
revocation, they will be revoked permanently.
* An extension developer also should run parser tests against a MW version with the
extension installed. The results of this should be provided in the extension
documentation. An extension should not be added to the extension matrix unless it provides
this information.
* A test harness that performs regression tests (currently only parser tests) against
every trunk versions committed in the last 24 hours should be run nightly. The installed
extensions should be those used on the WMF machines. The results should be published on
some page on the Mediawiki site. If any version increases the number of parser test
failures, the procedure described above for developers is initiated.
* A group of developers should have the responsibility of reviewing the nightly test
results to implement this QA process.
I am sure there are a whole bunch of other things that might be done to improve MW QA.
The point of this message is to initiate a discussion on what those might be.
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