[QA] Flagging some Beta Labs issues

Tue Aug 19 19:11:44 UTC 2014

On 19 August 2014 11:19, S Page <spage at wikimedia.org> wrote:

>
> On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 4:35 PM, Maryana Pinchuk <mpinchuk at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
>
>> and Design/UX for running remote and in-person user tests
>>
>
> That seems crazy. Beta labs constantly updates with the latest merged
> changes to core and dozens of extensions, I think 288 times a day. Any
> commit could break it, and they regularly do! Beta labs is there to test to
> find breaking changes before they go live, not for user testing.
>

I disagree. It's generally a reliable platform from which to user-test
master; it's rare for code to get merged into master that breaks anything,
let alone breaks the whole cluster. Frankly, when I'm using Beta Labs to
quickly UX-test master of VisualEditor, I don't care if (say) OracleDB
support is broken, or uploading doesn't work right now. I can only recall a
handful of occasions in the past year that VisualEditor master has been
broken by something else for more than a few seconds.

> Maybe we should document better how to set up a reasonably performant labs
> instance with a decent set  of wiki pages, templates, images, etc. Then UX
> can spin up ux-wikimania.wmflabs.org and be isolated from the firehose of
> changes.
>

For the love of all that is good in the world, can we *please* not create
yet another fork-wiki in Labs that someone needs to waste cycles updating
and no-one trusts to be up-to-date because they never are?

J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforrester at wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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