(In reply to comment #0)

• the beta cluster
• our use of Selenium, QUnit, Cucumber, etc.
• larger quality assurance issues and initiatives
• volunteer engagement in testing, test-writing, and QA

Just for the record, beta cluster and qunit should be omitted from this list.

People who manage the beta cluster[1] and QUnit[2] testing aren't even on the same team and neither in QA[3].

We collaborate in all three directions, but anything important for Beta or QUnit is unlikely to be discussed on this list.

[1] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Nova_Resource:Deployment-prep
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Continuous_integration
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/QA

Unless the word "-testing" in "qa-testing" is meant to generalise the scope wider than QA. I interpreted as subtitle for "qa".

An umbrella list could be useful, though in the past mixed streams of these teams hasn't improved things (in fact, we split it up further to avoid noise).

This list is being proposed as a way to integrate and retain people primarily interested in testing / qa, especially those that are new or are in the periphery. No teams comfortable with the status quo will be encouraged to change their current communication practices because of this list.

I wouldn't be too rigid with our own org structure. What is relevant is to keep an outsider's perspective here. For instance, at the beginning Chris was a bit reluctant to include bug triaging under the QA umbrella since he and Andre were in different teams. I convinced them (without much resistance) ;) that people out there don't care: they see that by testing you file bugs, and at some point you have so many that you need to start paying attention to triaging.

Something similar can be said about unit testing, continuous integration, etc. Sure, they are very different areas but well, all of them get the primary attention from people that care about the quality of the software we ship.

We are seeing many people interested in "testing" from different angles. Some people are current developers willing to learn and discuss more about this topic, best practices, etc. Some are people new to the community that see testing / QA as a way to contribute in technical tasks other than development.

We have already little lists for design or analytics, which are proving to be useful for people focusing on those topics and not really comfortable about following the volume of wikitech-l just to find now and then a thread that fits with their core interests.

Thehelpfulonewiki wrote:

Quim: so do we plan to have more qa-* lists in the future, or would this be better suited as simply being called "qa"?

No plans to have more qa-* lists.

qa alone is consistent with http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/QA so I'm fine with this.

sumanah wrote:

Yeah, I'm fine with "qa@". If ampersands were acceptable in email addresses I would have requested "qa&testing" because testing and quality assurance are different but related things.

With that in mind, I have changed the bug summary. comment #0 remains the same request except for the username/name of the list. This list should be a place to talk about testing and QA for the people who are interested in all facets of them.

(In reply to comment #1)

(In reply to comment #0)

• the beta cluster
• our use of Selenium, QUnit, Cucumber, etc.
• larger quality assurance issues and initiatives
• volunteer engagement in testing, test-writing, and QA

Just for the record, beta cluster and qunit should be omitted from this list.

I agree that qunit would not necessarily be relevant, but beta labs is. For one thing, the biggest consumer of beta labs services right now is the automated browser tests, with manual testing using beta also. For another thing, beta labs is critical to preventing defects in production by finding them in QA/testing practice. The best example I know is https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42452 , a problem found in beta labs, incorrectly identified as not a bug (because beta labs was not in a reliable state at the time, that was very expensive to fix in production.

The topic of a QA mail list has come up in the past, and as I recall, consensus at that time was that a dedicated QA mail list would create even more of an isolated QA silo than already exists.

I think this is a real concern. Given that QA/testing is an activity that happens along with software development, is there a reasonable expectation that software development teams, for example E2, E3, VE, Platform, would participate and find useful a QA mail list?

So after thinking this over, I'd like to suggest a different name and a particular focus for this list.

Our immediate problem is that we have on the order of seven people connected with WMF as staff or volunteers with an interest in automated browser tests. Added to those seven are the developers from WMDE who want to port their existing Selenium tests to our Cucumber+Jenkins framework. These are roughly a dozen people working with browser test automation, with a wide variety of experience who have no dedicated forum for conversation.

I think a list dedicated to a technical discussion of browser test automation makes sense. Such a list should appeal not only to those working on test automation for our projects, but to the browser test automation community in general.

If in the future we need a more general mail list for general QA issues like test planning or bug management, we should differentiate those activities from the technical issues associated with browser test automation.

So I propose a "test-automation" mail list, with a particular focus on browser test automation. This topic allows for the possibility of discussion other kinds of automated testing in the future, but solves our immediate need for a technical forum for browser automation.

sumanah wrote:

After discussion, Chris, Filipin, Quim, and I have agreed to:

• create a qa@ list
• focus it at first on the browser automation community, especially people new to Wikimedia
• reevaluate in six months

I just want to state that regarding transparency concerns, announcing things on wikitech-l seems most appropriate (regardless of the existence of a dedicated list, since that should be an opt-in list for the curious/involved people, anything "everyone" should be given the chance to hear about, should go to wikitech-l whether or not in addition to qa-l)

Thehelpfulonewiki wrote:

I've waited to create this list for a few more days in case there were further comments.

Sumana your comment was about 20 minutes after Chris suggested a completely different name and focus for the list. Please could you confirm that qa@ should be the list name?

sumanah wrote:

Krinkle: agreed, we should cross-post announcements to wikitech-l.

Thehelpfulone: the intervening 20 minutes contained the discussion with Quim and Chris where we agreed to create a qa@ list and focus it at first on the browser automation community, especially people new to Wikimedia, and reevaluate in six months. So yes, confirmed, go ahead.

Thehelpfulonewiki wrote:

Thanks Sumana. List created at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/qa and sent the list admin password to Chris and Quim. Please feel free to add some more detail about the scope of the list at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/admin/qa/?VARHELP=general/info which will then show up on that main list info page.

I have requested the addition of the list on gmane.org under name 'gmane.org.wikimedia.qa'.

Thank you! I'm afk half of this week, but I will announce the list as soon as I'm back.

I have requested the creation of this list at gmane :

#gmane.org.wikimedia.qa qa@lists.wikimedia.org

Wikimedia Browser Automation Testing discussion
mailman dummy 
encode=encrypt
lang=eng
mail-archive=yes
url=http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance

Subscription messages for the requested mailing lists have been sent.
The resulting groups will be created when the first message
arrives from the mailing lists.

Mmm... I sent a "First post" to the list half hour ago. Nothing received, the archives are still virgin http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/qa/ and everything at the admin interface looks normal. Yes, I'm subscribed.

Thehelpfulonewiki wrote:

Hmm did you get the email I just sent to the list? Perhaps you just sent it to @wikimedia.org instead of @lists.wikimedia.org?

Ok, I just learned that when you sent an email to *@lists.wikimeda.org (with an "i" missing) you don't receive any error. ;)

Everything works: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/qa/2013-May/date.html

PS: funny to make a typo in a first post for a QA list.......

That first post has created the 'gmane.org.wikimedia.qa' group \o/