Hi everyone,

I’d like to welcome Chris McMahon to the Platform Engineering team as our new QA Lead. Chris has a long history working in software testing, coming to us most recently from Sentry Data Systems where he was responsible for test automation. One particularly relevant bit of experience from Chris’s past was his work at Socialtext on their wiki product, expanding the Selenium-based automated test suite from 400 individual assertions to 10,000 over the span of two years.

Chris is also active in the outside community. He leads the Writing About Testing group and annual conference, which he founded in 2009. He also helped design and build the SeleNesse testing framework, which is a wiki-based tool for building acceptance tests that get executed by Selenium.

In his role as QA Lead here, Chris will be responsible for figuring out what sorts of testing process we can bring to MediaWiki development. His first task will to join in on the tail end of the 1.19 deployment process, helping us with whatever last minute testing that makes sense at this stage, but then he’ll have the much larger task of looking at our release and deployment process generally, and figure out which parts would most benefit from the injection of testing rigor. He’ll also be responsible for establishing a more coordinated volunteer effort around testing.

Chris will be working remotely from his home in Durango, Colorado.

Welcome, Chris!