Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Community QA and Testing

Collaborative software testing: you can help

On May 5th, 2012, the Weekend Testing Americas group were invited to focus on testing Wikimedia sites during their monthly two-hour session.

The objective was to identify issues related to the new faster deployment schedule of MediaWiki to Wikimedia sites. The timing was excellent, as version 1.20wmf2 of MediaWiki had been deployed to all non-Wikipedia sites (like Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons), while all of the Wikipedias were still running 1.20wmf1.

Weekend Testing is "a platform for software testers to collaborate, test various kinds of software, foster hope, gain peer recognition, and be of value to the community".

In less than two hours, the Weekend Testers reported fourteen issues in Bugzilla, based on a test plan I had prepared. In general, the quality of the reports was quite good. The WTA team posted an experience report of the session, as well as a full transcript (PDF, 142 KiB).

Building on the success of the Weekend Testing event, we will be collaborating with OpenHatch on another community testing event on June 9th, 2012, with the aim of discovering issues with the new Article Feedback Tool (AFT). As with MediaWiki 1.20, the timing for testing AFT is particularly opportune, as the software will be nearly in its final state, and the AFT team will be in a position to address issues found in the final stages of AFT development.

Collaborative software testing by the community is in an early, experimental stage at the Wikimedia Foundation, but based on the success so far, we expect to see more such events in the future. And you are welcome to join us and OpenHatch on 9 June to help test the Article Feedback Tool!

Chris McMahon
QA Lead