When I was hired as QA Lead almost seven months ago, WMF lacked a test environment where
* code was routinely deployed ahead of production * the test environment emulated the production environment closely * aspects of the test environment (config, permissions, etc.) could be easily and reliably manipulated for testing purposes
Today I am happy to announce that beta labs fulfills those needs.
Beta labs is intended to host the upcoming release of Mediawiki, plus those extensions scheduled for deployment to production, for the purpose of testing and investigation.
As of a little while ago, Mediawiki, AFTv5, New Pages Feed/Page Curation, and UploadWizard are being deployed to beta labs from git automatically and reliably. The configurations for those extensions are also being managed in git. The environment itself is managed via puppet, and emulates production to the greatest extent possible. Many many thanks to Antoine Musso for making this possible.
As of this week, all these extensions are up, running, and configured to be useful. Note that they are not perfect, just useful. For example, right now on beta enwiki both AFTv4 and AFTv5 input forms appear on the same page in many cases, because I was experimenting with what happens when these extensions are not configured correctly. Some actions from the Page Curation toolbar never complete. As these glitches become important to testing, we will get them working correctly, and likely will find out some interesting things about the software along the way.
The timing for this announcement is excellent, because new QA Engineers will be joining WMF soon (more on that next week), and beta labs will be a prime target for the browser-level end-to-end automated tests we will shortly be creating. Also, we have been wanting to retire the 'prototype' host for some time, and having AFTv5 etc. on beta labs should make that possible.
In summary, beta labs is up and running with current code for Mediawiki and critical extensions, and at this point the best way to improve beta labs is to use it.
http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:ArticleFeedbackv5 http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:NewPagesFeed http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard