[QA] screenshots hack?

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Hi,

There's something that bothered me for a while about VisualEditor, and
essentially it can be said about any other user-facing component that we
are developing: If we are writing a user manual, such as
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:VisualEditor/User_guide , we want to
get it translated to as many languages as possible to be useful to all
people. It's quite easy to do with the Translate extension, but how do we
translate the screenshots?

It's possible (though not trivial) to make a custom file name for each
language, but this still leaves the question of how will the screenshots be
created and updated when the developers change the UI.

And now it suddenly struck me: Can we use our tests for that? To do
something like this:
1. Write test scenarios that run the features described in the user manual.
2. Run these scenarios on all the languages that we support (or at least on
a large set, say fifty languages).
3. Get the screenshots that are create in SauceLabs, and save them with a
suffix of a language code in the file name.
4. Upload them automatically to Commons.
5. Profit: Truly localized user manuals.
6. Profit 2: Truly multilingual tests.

Maybe we don't even have to run this job regularly, if it's too heavy. It
will probably be enough to do it once every couple of weeks or simply by
demand, when a feature clearly changes.

Is this crazy talk? Or can it scale?

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
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