Chris McMahon's Blog

So I'm giving a talk next week at the Agile2013 Conference about "radically open software testing".  It's about my experience over the last eighteen months or so founding and maintaining the QA/testing practice for the Wikimedia Foundation , the good folks who keep the lights on at Wikipedia . I've done some little peer conferences, but I haven't presented at or even attended a big conference like Agile2013 since I talked about browser test design at Agile2009 in Chicago.  That worked out pretty well, at least Dave Haeffner liked it .  I know a little more about the subject since I gave that presentation also. I think my presentation might be unusual.  I have nothing to sell.  I have no particular agenda to advance, except to encourage people to contribute to Wikipedia.  I intend to talk about some notable failures too.  What I'll be discussing isn't even particularly "agile", for whatever value the word "agile" has today any...

For anyone interested in helping to test the software the runs Wikipedia, we have a new mail list dedicated to exactly that topic. The mail list is not even a month old, so the archives are pretty readable .     If you're interested, you can sign up here . Let me expand on what I mean by "open testing" and by "interested".  At any given time, there are dozens of software development projects (at least) in progress in support of Wikipedia.  Some of these projects are for particular niches in the Wikipedia universe, but others are expensive, high-profile, in some cases world-changing. Every one of these projects needs more testing than it gets. So if you want to spend an hour looking for bugs in a Wikipedia feature under development, that's great.  We at the Wikimedia Foundation have worked with Weekend Testing Americas and other organizations on several occasions to do exactly that. But would you like to help design every aspect of the ongoing test ...

Wikipedia is improving the new user experience. Wikipedia is developing a new way to create accounts on Wikipedia and a new experience for new users when logging in. Weekend Testing Americas has an online test event on the first Saturday of every month 10AM-1PM Pacific time (17:00-20:00 UTC).  On April 6 WTA will be testing account creation, login, and the new user experience for Wikipedia . Justin Rohrman will facilitate.  If you'd like to join this Saturday: Send a message on Skype to weekendtestersamericas  Join #wikimedia-dev on freenode on IRC  Read over the Test Plan   Test!   (If you can't attend the Weekend Testing session but you are interested in QA for Wikipedia, we have public QA events ranging from bug triage to Cucumber development every week.)

I am the QA Lead for the  Wikimedia Foundation   I test Wikipedia .  My one year anniversary was in January.  I do exploratory testing and I do browser test automation with my colleague  Željko Filipin .  I have a strong interest right now in community testing of all kinds. I'll be talking about testing Wikipedia at some conferences soon: GTAC April 23-24, NYC Telerik Test Summit May 3-4, Austin TX Wikimedia Hackathon May 24-26, Amsterdam Agile2013  (pending acceptance) Aug 4-10, Nashville TN I used to write about software a lot:  SearchSoftwareQuality.com   (warning: registration wall),  StickyMinds.com   and a couple of articles  for   PragPub .   I wrote a chapter for  Beautiful Testing . For many years I have been telecommuting from Durango CO where I created and hosted the Writing About Testing peer conference .  WAT is unlikely to happen again. I am on my way out of Durango, but I w...

UPDATE 28 January the official announcement on the WMF blog . The Wikimedia Foundation is developing new editing software for Wikipedia.  For the first time in history we intend to have a native rich text WYSIWYG editor for the Mediawiki engine that does not require users to know wiki markup syntax in order to create and edit articles on Wikipedia.  Right now the Foundation needs help testing this editor, and we invite you to participate. We have a suite of automated tests for the editor that is capable of checking the contents of existing articles, loading them into VisualEditor, saving the article, and checking that no information has been lost in the round-trip saving operation.  We are confident that the editor is robust enough to load and save any given content on the English Wikipedia.  What is not clear is whether VisualEditor is robust enough to preserve information after that information has been altered:  additions, changes, deletions, other ...

Almost a year ago I started working as QA Lead for the Wikimedia Foundation .  Among other things, I had a mandate to create an automated browser testing practice at WMF. From the start I wanted this project to be a world class, completely open, reference implementation of such a project, using the best and most modern tools and practices I could find.  I wanted this to be a project that anyone could read, anyone could run, and to which anyone could contribute.  I wanted this to be an industry standard implementation of a well-designed, well-implemented, working browser test automation project. Around 2006 my career had veered off into a test automation approach that, while valid and useful in certain circumstances, would be inappropriate for the WMF project.  And in the years since 2006, the tools and practices that were immature at the time had grown into mature, stable, powerful projects of their own.  I set out to educate myself about the details of ...

The Wikimedia Foundation currently has two open positions for QA staff.  One is for a QA Engineer and the other for a Volunteer QA Coordinator .  I want to point out what a unique opportunity this is. Before I was hired at WMF four months ago as "QA Lead", there had never been anyone working on the Wikipedias and related projects whose only focus was testing and quality.  There was no UI test automation, there was no program of community testing.   Actually, there still isn't.  That's where these new staff come in.  No exaggeration:  this is an opportunity to create from scratch the quality and testing practices for one of the great achievements in human history.  But WMF only has about 100 staff, and only about half of those are technical.  At the moment, there are about 50 regular contributors to WMF software (and millions and millions of users!), so this QA staff will be outnumbered and outgunned.  So we need help, both from aut...