[QA] Flagging some Beta Labs issues

[Jon Robson]

FWIW I think the more people with different use cases using beta labs
the better. It gives us more confidence that the code we push out is
of good quality. Whilst doing things like troubleshooting browser
tests, I've noticed various bugs in my day to day activities on beta
labs that I was not actively looking for.

I would like to keep us heavily using beta labs to improve the quality
of the software we push out.

On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 12:11 PM, James Forrester
<jforrester at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 19 August 2014 11:19, S Page <spage at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 4:35 PM, Maryana Pinchuk <mpinchuk at wikimedia.org>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> and Design/UX for running remote and in-person user tests
>>
>>
>> That seems crazy. Beta labs constantly updates with the latest merged
>> changes to core and dozens of extensions, I think 288 times a day. Any
>> commit could break it, and they regularly do! Beta labs is there to test to
>> find breaking changes before they go live, not for user testing.
>
>
> I disagree. It's generally a reliable platform from which to user-test
> master; it's rare for code to get merged into master that breaks anything,
> let alone breaks the whole cluster. Frankly, when I'm using Beta Labs to
> quickly UX-test master of VisualEditor, I don't care if (say) OracleDB
> support is broken, or uploading doesn't work right now. I can only recall a
> handful of occasions in the past year that VisualEditor master has been
> broken by something else for more than a few seconds.
>
>>
>> Maybe we should document better how to set up a reasonably performant labs
>> instance with a decent set  of wiki pages, templates, images, etc. Then UX
>> can spin up ux-wikimania.wmflabs.org and be isolated from the firehose of
>> changes.
>
>
> For the love of all that is good in the world, can we please not create yet
> another fork-wiki in Labs that someone needs to waste cycles updating and
> no-one trusts to be up-to-date because they never are?
>
> J.
> --
> James D. Forrester
> Product Manager, Editing
> Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
>
> jforrester at wikimedia.org | @jdforrester