[QA] [reading-wmf] Recently failing browser tests

[Chris McMahon]

On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 11:38 AM, Gergo Tisza <gtisza at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 11:23 AM, Jon Robson <jrobson at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> Another thing I'd be interested in exploring is using JavaScript to write
>> tests since a lot more devs are comfortable with JS than Ruby but I suspect
>> this is a big undertaking?
>>
>
> Re: browser test language, there has been some debate about this (both PHP
> and JS have mature gherkin-based tools, and most developers are more
> familiar with them than with Ruby), but the opinion of QA at the time was
> that a language which the browser testing community tends to be familiar
> with is better than a language the MediaWiki community tends to be familiar
> with.
>

That's actually not true. We chose Ruby more than three years ago because:

* of all the candidate languages only Ruby and Python fully support the
whole Selenium API.
* only Ruby has anything like the watir-webdriver API, a fully
HTML5-compliant high level wrapper for Selenium that affords features we
use every day in the WMF browser tests.
* only Ruby has a a canonical implementation of the Page Object design
pattern in the page_object Ruby gem
* incidentally, we thought we'd make more use of RSpec custom matching
features, and Dan still might
* Cucumber remains a great way to bring on newbie contributors from GSoC,
OPW, etc.

Three years ago neither PHP nor Javascript had reasonable bindings for
Selenium, and that remains true today.

The WMF browser test tools are entirely 100% off-the-shelf NIH. That was a
design goal from the start.
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