A fruitful week

  I thought I would write up my prior week activities as it was an unusually varied week, where I got to try a lot of new things.

  Starting off last Tuesday, we had an IRC meeting for the Outreach Program for Women, where I got to hear about the projects all the interns are working on.  Here is a description of how the meeting went from an email that I sent to my mentor Zeljko:

  "All 37 of the interns introduced ourselves and talked about our projects. I mentioned that we are looking for volunteers to help us do Cucumber/Ruby test cases, and one of the OPW interns messaged me that she was interested in helping us!  She is familiar with Gherkin, which I believe is the language for Cucumber. (editors note: Yes, I confirmed Gherkin is the language for Cucumber).  Anyhow, I sent her the link for our QA mailing list, and she signed up while we were chatting!   Her name is Shivani Poddar and here is her blog: http://shivanipoddar.wordpress.com blog. She is working on the Gnome Music project for her internship.   I also learned there is a $500 travel allowance for each OPW intern...I'm not sure of the criteria but I can send the complete transcript of the session when I receive it from Marina who runs OPW.
Also I discovered Marina, who runs the OPW program at Gnome, works nearby which is quite amazing.  We are going to try to meet up on Thursday for coffee . So, I found it to be an enjoyable and productive meeting."

  The next day, Zeljko requested that I test the new Mediawiki-Vagrant software that has recently been developed at Wikimedia.  MediaWiki-Vagrant is a nifty piece of software that creates a portable MediaWiki development environment.  It consists of a set of configuration scripts for Vagrant and VirtualBox that automate the creation of a virtual machine that runs MediaWiki software.  Once installed, there are a number of configurations or "roles" that can be set up for this software.  The one we are using is the Selenium automated testing role.  I was asked to document the steps it took to get this working on Windows, so that volunteers could use Mediawiki_Vagrant to automatically set up their own QA environments for the upcoming workshop.  Rather than having to install Ruby and the other QA tools, they can just run Mediawiki-Vagrant to get their test environments set up automatically.  The software had already been tested on Ubuntu and Mac, and my job was to test it on my Windows machine.  Well, this turned out to be more than I had bargained for.  All three pieces of software (VirtualBox, Vagrant and MediaWiki-Vagrant)  are needed to make MediaWiki-Vagrant work, and there was a lot to learn as I installed and tested the software.  One problem I discovered is that  Mediawiki-Vagrant won't work if it is installed in the  C:\Program Files directory.  It doesn't like the spaces in the name, Program Files, and the command "vagrant up" that starts the config process will bomb out as a result.  This wasn't obvious at first, but after some in-depth troubleshooting I was able to figure it out.  I then reinstalled MediaWiki-Vagrant at the C:\ level, and the "vagrant up" command worked, and config completed successfully.  I then changed the roles.yaml file to point to selenium testing, and ran one of our tests.  This time I got another error message: "Unable to pick a platform for the provided browser (RuntimeError)", at which point Zeljko pointed me to a section about Adding a Gui  that he thought would solve the problem.  After installing the Nomachine client as suggested, I am still unable to connect to mediawiki-vagrant.dev through NoMachine.  If anyone has gotten NoMachine working with Vagrant on Windows, please drop me a line in either the comments or in email to let me know how you did it.


On Thursday, we ran a great QA Automation Workshop for volunteers.  It was Zeljko's first time running a workshop, and my first time helping out with one.  He did a great job explaining the material and keeping everyone engaged.  During the workshop, Zeljko used our Cucumber/Ruby/Selenium tools to demonstrate how to write and run an actual test for the Wikilove feature of Wikipedia..  I would encourage you all to watch the YouTube video of his presentation, or at least part of it, to get an idea of how we run our workshops at Wikimedia.  In this case, the workshop was not onsite at the Wikimedia offices, but was run completely remote through Google Hangout.  (You may want to skip the first 3-4 minutes of the video as we were we sorting out technical difficulties getting the video feed working ).  I have been impressed by the number of volunteers that have turned out for our QA workshops.  For this workshop, we had 11 volunteers attending!  Some of them have already contributed to our QA efforts by writing new tests for us, or by fixing easy bugs.  We have just set up a link to our easy bugs in Bugzilla, so volunteers are able to browse for bugs that are easy to fix, assign a bug to themselves, and then work on fixing it.

After the workshop, I was able to run out and meet Marina Zhurakhinskaya for coffee, which was totally awesome.  I learned a lot from her about the history of the OPW program and more about the FOSS movement.

Of course, in between all of these events I was hard at work on another Visual Editor test that checks if  Visual Editor is present when user logs in.

 So, all in all, a very productive and interesting week.  Now it looks like I've caught up a bit with my writeups, so I will try to keep it up and catch up on the current week's activities in my next blog.

 
Anyone interested in helping us write QA tests?
Please sign up at our Wikimedia QA mailing list.

Further questions or queries?  Feel free to email me at rachelqa99 [at] gmail [dot] com .

Thank you for your interest :)