To clarify, is the QA team now under Release Engineering as Chris' comment
seems to imply, and how does this org change effect security engineering?
Thanks,
Pine
On Jul 29, 2014 10:53 AM, "Greg Grossmeier" <greg(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
<quote name="Rob Lanphier"
date="2014-07-29" time="09:52:47 -0700">
They are broadly responsible for the lifecycle of
code from the point
that a developer is ready to check it in through its deployment on our
site, maintaining the processes and tools that reduce negative user
impact of site software changes while simultaneously making software
change deployment efficient and joyful.
Chris McMahon shared the below quote on the internal thread for this
announcement, and I thought it was useful to share here as well:
<quote name="Chris McMahon" date="2014-07-29" time="08:58:11
-0700">
I think it's worth pointing out that RelEng
is not only concerned with
releasing software early and often, but also concerned with releasing
software *safely*. You don't hear much about it, but stuff we also do:
* Put in place and run all the linters, unit tests, qunit tests in
Jenkins
* Deploy the master branch of all core and all
extensions to beta labs
every three minutes
* Run automated browser tests in beta labs at least twice per day, and
analyze the results
* Do exploratory testing in beta labs
* Maintain the deploy tools like scap
* And manage the process within which all of these things are productive
In Jenkins we find and fix code problems, for example with syntax and
structure.
In beta labs we find and fix a number of sorts of problems:
* configuration mistakes, like for caching or database.
* integration problems, for example when a change to VisualEditor makes
it
stop working for MobileFrontend, or a change to
Core breaks VE.
* regression problems, where a change in one part of the code
unexpectedly
makes some other features stop working
correctly.
People sometimes ask me why the browser test builds are red so much. The
answer is that they are showing where changes and problems are. Red
tests
give us information.
So today we spend very little time in production "putting out fires", as
Andrew put it. Of course, we can't find and fix every problem, but I
have
no doubt that our current practices and processes
are saving Ops and Core
and Features engineers many frustrating hours every week.
And speaking of practices and processes, having a Team Practices group in
place will be great. We have many interests in common.
And if you're interested, I'm giving a short talk on the subject at
Wikimania:
https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Finding_and_fixing_sof…
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| Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E |
| identi.ca: @greg A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |
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