[QA] Tests for MediaWiki vs beta

[Chris McMahon]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 4:33 AM, Željko Filipin <zfilipin at wikimedia.org>wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 3:02 AM, Chris Steipp <csteipp at wikimedia.org>wrote:
>
>> At the moment, I've cloned into another repo and I'm just fixing the
>> tests to work for a tarball install, but is there a proper way to extend
>> those tests so that we don't need an entire new repo for VE vs. non-VE
>> tests? I see several places that load a different page object for
>> ie6/phantomjs, is that a good design pattern that I should copy?
>
>
> It is hard to give a good answer without looking at the code at the same
> time. I would highly suggest that you pair with somebody familiar with
> Selenium and Ruby, at least in beginning. Ping me off list if you would
> like to pair with me.
>
>
So as I noted above, I did some research into what browser tests for a bare
wiki would look like.  I looked at both a fresh Mediawiki installation on a
local machine, and also at a vagrant instance with only the Mediawiki role
enabled.

What I discovered is that our existing tests are just not useful here.
 Wikipedia wikis are radically different than bare Mediawiki.  So I would
suggest doing a few things:

* Make a repo of tests somewhere whose sole target is a bare wiki, just
like we have browser tests in ~10 other extension repos whose target is
extension features.
* Create a suite of shallow tests for a bare Mediawiki install with no
data.  I made a bug for that here:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60347 .  (This would be a
great intern/volunteer project I think).
* Real Soon Now we will have the ability to create test data at run time
via the Mediawiki API.  Jeff has a good start on this, and we are pairing
face-to-face tomorrow to take that as far as we can in a day.  We expect
this to be generally available fairly soon.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58939

-C
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