Berlin meeting

The Berlin conference was over before I realised it. I had prepared a presentation, not many people saw it because there was no beamer and, people were more interested in a demo and in discussing what the testing environment is all about.

I demoed the testing environment, I scratch installed the Wikipedia environment many times. I explained the benefits of a shared testing framework, why the ability of installing an environment is so crucial, how we can run the tests the extensions that are installed. Most importantly I explained who the interested parties are.

• A developer spends 70 to 90% of his time testing and debugging, quality testing cuts down on that number
• Brion needs to do the same tests, so when he has the tests he will be more efficient
• Many people run their own MediaWiki installation, they need to know if an extension works for them

For me the most important take home message is what Brion told me: "People want me to look at code, if this code comes with testcases I can run, I am much more likely to have a look".  When you consider the number of extensions that are waiting for Brion to look at, extensions that have community support, it is clear that testing and sharing the test-cases is an essential tool in the battle for Brion's attention.
Thanks,
        GerardM

Fosdem 2009

Brion will be one of the speakers at FOSDEM. It is great to meet Brion at FOSDEM. What I find really exciting is that we will demonstrate our ExtensionTesting environment to him. Let me know what we are currently testing:

• Installation routines for MediaWiki
• Installation routines for MediaWiki extensions
• Setting up test cases for testing HTML output for MediaWiki or extensions
• Running automated test cases
  
• Uninstall routines for MediaWiki
• Uninstall routines for MediaWiki extensions

When you get the impression that most of this can be run in a batch from a script, that is exactly our intention. When you get the impression that an installation routine can be used in a production environment, that should be possible as well.

We are working hard to have a live demonstration for Brion. My main worry at the moment is the availability of Internet.
Thanks,
GerardM