[QA] Pair programming Friday for fun and profit

[Jeremy L. Grajales]

I just finished pairing with Zeljko on Google Hangouts today.
It was a very informative session for me and I am grateful that Zeljko was
able to offer his time.

First we talked about the test2 and labs clusters and the difference
between them.
Zeljko explained that the labs cluster is updated more frequently than the
test2 cluster.
Therefore, the labs cluster is more up-to-date with the latest features,
but is also less stable than the test2 cluster.

Zeljko also talked about exploratory testing.
He walked me through the process of exploratory testing on the test2 and
labs clusters.
He even discovered a bug in the VisualEditor and showed me how to post the
bug in Bugzilla.
Before posting the bug, he showed me how to search for related bugs in
order to avoid posting duplicates.
This involved using bugzilla search and incrementally tightening the search
parameters
until he was convinced that the bug had not yet been recorded.
This served as a great introduction to bug tracking which is a new area for
me.

We also went over continuous integration which Zeljko explained was a
solution to integrating large projects.
He also reviewed Jenkins jobs. He showed me how jobs were configured to run
a given shell script at a certain frequency to produce XML reports.
He explained how these reports are later emailed and forwarded to the IRC
channel.

We also talked a little bit about Selenium which Zeljko explained was a
tool that drives browsers.
He also showed me how to run Selenium tests locally, set up login
credentials for tests, and to run remote browser tests on Saucelabs.
Saucelabs was running a bit slow today, but we were able to playback some
previous Saucelabs browser tests and view screenshots.
We were also able to watch the browser test that he launched remotely live
(although it was a bit slow as I mentioned).

Zeljko gave me a few helpful links to get me started:

Zeljko's Book "Web Application Testing in Ruby" ->
https://leanpub.com/watirbook
Ruby Language Documentation -> https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/
Jeff Morgan's "Cucumber & Cheese" -> https://leanpub.com/cucumber_and_cheese

I have plenty more to learn about exploratory and automated testing... I'm
sure.
But this is a great introduction and it has made me more confident browsing
through Bugzilla and Jenkins.
I have a much better idea of what I'm looking at.
I'm sure if I have any questions (which I certainly will) I will post them
on the IRC channel (or here on the mailing list?).

But with that said...
I would like to thank Zeljko again for his time. So far, this has been a
surprisingly welcoming experience.
And I hope that I will be able to make useful contributions in the future.

Cheers
Jeremy L. Grajales



On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 7:06 AM, Željko Filipin <zfilipin at wikimedia.org>wrote:

> Hi Jeremy and welcome! :)
>
> A lot of Firefox windows popping up is usually a good sign. We can try
> making your first contribution tomorrow.
>
> Željko
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 1:37 PM, Jeremy L. Grajales <
> jeremygrajales at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello Zeljko,
>>
>> My name is Jeremy. I spoke to you on the QA channel earlier about pairing
>> up this Tuesday. I stumbled upon mediawiki to explore the free software
>> community.
>> And I am trying to find a place to contribute somewhere.
>>
>> I am familiar with PHP/MySQL and frontend languages.
>> But all of the tools used in QA are mostly alien to me.
>>
>> I have done a bit of reading in the QA wiki. I can be proficient in
>> learning a new language on my own. But I am mostly looking for help
>> distinguishing between the different QA tools and their usage here. I am
>> also curious about the workflow being used. Of course, I am not setting
>> boundaries on what I need to and don't need to learn here. I am very green.
>> Any direction would be most helpful.
>>
>> I have set up accounts on bugzilla, beta labs, test2.
>> I have also subscribed for developer access (
>> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developer_access).
>>
>> I also ran a Cucumber test on my system.
>> A lot of Firefox windows were popping up. Not sure if it was doing what
>> it was supposed to be doing though (just to give you an idea of how lost I
>> am).
>>
>> Skype id: jeremygrajales
>> Google: jeremygrajales
>> Freenode: jeremylee
>> TZ: UTC-5
>>
>> Looking forward to meeting.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Jeremy G
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> QA mailing list
>> QA at lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/qa
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
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