Hello! My name is Barb, and I'm an Outreachy Round 17 intern. From December 2018 to March 2019 I will work with the QA team to expand test coverage for various MediaWiki features and tools.

This page is where I will store my status reports -- and anything else of interest that comes up along the way!

Weekly Reports

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Week Dates Summary
1 12/04/18 - 12/08/18 Orientation! Joined Zulip, set up a MediaWiki user page, set up a blog, and wrote two blog posts (The Journey Begins and Context-Driven Testing. Spoke with Elena, who will be my mentor for Content Translation tasks. She outlined my first task and also explained the overall testing process.
2 12/09/18 - 12/15/18 Began my first Content Translation project. Worked my way down the initial set of test cases that Elena gave to me, editing, reorganizing, and adding test cases as I went. (Still not finished, but made good progress.) In running the test cases, I paid attention to the weekly test schedule, doing my best to stick to the environments that were the focus of the day's testing. (Not 100% successful at that, but expect to get better.)

Blog post: My First Project.

3 12/16/18 - 12/22/18 I finally finished "first draft" of a set of test cases that can serve as a "smoke test" for Content Translation as it moves through the various test environments. (Of course, I'll need to maintain it to make sure it keeps pace with the product. In fact, no sooner had I finished it than I noticed that changes were afoot in one of the panels!) On Friday, I did a "test drive" to see how long it took to get through the complete set. But I had to abandon my speed test, because within the first fifteen minutes I'd found two bugs! It turns out that one of them was a known issue, but the other was not, and I made a bug report: T212545. It is very gratifying to see that the tests actually turn up issues!
4 12/23/18 - 12/29/18 Short week due to the Christmas holiday. In running the test cases, I found some product features that I'd previously overlooked, so I expanded the test suite to include them. I also reorganized the tests so that the entire set can be run straight through from a single set-up.

Blog post: On Diving In.

5 12/30/18 - 1/05/19 Another short holiday week. I'm doing speed tests on the test suite (so far, it takes between 1.5 and 1.8 hours to run them all). While doing the speed tests, I discovered that some dialog boxes had changed, so I updated the associated test cases. There's no such thing as "finishing" the test suite, is there? It needs to change along with the product!

I also started constructing a page called "Content Translation/Exploratory Testing Tools". We can keep test suite spreadsheets there for others to download. We can also store test pages that aggregate items like tables, templates, math formulas, and anything else we particularly want to test. (Of course, we still need to figure out how to get the test sites to upload such pages; it's a problem, because the pages can't be published on the production sites that are the normal source of CX test data.) Until we figure out how to deploy test pages, I will at least keep an index of wiki pages that are a good source of the items we want to test.

6 1/06/19 - 1/12/19 This week I spoke with Rummana Yasmeen (my other mentor) and she explained my second project, which will be to test the Visual Editor. I got to work reading up on the tool, which seems to have a LOT of moving parts, including separate widgets for templates, references, maps, math formulas, and music notation -- in addition to the stuff you usually find in WYSIWYG editors, like text formatting, links, tables, and image/video uploading.

Meanwhile, in CX:

  • Continued testing CX; I'm familiar with it now, so I can squeeze in some meaningful testing each day even while making room for the new project.
  • Found a bug (T213235)!
  • Updated the set of test cases.
  • Elena reviewed the draft Exploratory Testing Tools page, and she and I are going to talk about how to develop it further.

Blog post: More about the kind of testing I'm doing

7 1/13/19 - 1/19/19 I am now spending the mornings testing CX and the afternoons testing VE.
  • I'm learning and testing VE widget by widget. So far I have looked at: paragraph and text formatting, links, lists, special characters, citations (automatic and manual), media uploads, and templates.
  • As I learn VE, I am following Rummana's suggestion and creating a testing "checklist". (This checklist has proven to be so handy that I am starting to create one for CX as well. Ultimately I want add it to the CX Exploratory Testing Tools page.)
  • In CX testing news, found another bug: T213784! Yay! Also updated the test cases.
8 1/20/19 - 1/26/19 Worked on both VE and CX this week.
  • Found a VE bug: T214453! (Is it uncool to get so excited about that?)
  • Continued working my way through the different VE widgets. So far this week I've looked at: templates (didn't finish going through those last week), tables, comments, hieroglyphs, musical notations, image galleries, chemical and math formulas, maps, graphs, and code blocks. My VE testing checklist is just about done.
  • Continued to test CX for 2-3 hours a day.

Blog post: My goals evolve.

9 1/27/19 - 2/02/19
  • Finished VE regression-testing checklist.
  • Continued testing VE, following checklist and consulting VE Phabricator workboard.
  • Found and documented two bugs: T214959 and T214991. (Initially a single bug; worked with team member to split into two bugs, then verified the second when patch was supplied.)
10 2/03/19 - 2/09/19 CX: Focused on investigating bugs relating to math formulas.
  • Spent several days comparing HTML output for a block of source material translated using different engines, and noticed that the actual structure of the HTML differs depending on the engine used, which is not something you'd expect.
  • Spent a couple more days re-testing the 10 pages referenced by a particular math formula bug (T137803) and organizing the findings into a table that compared the results of different translation engines, with "Copy Original Content" as a control and supporting screenshots in footnotes.

Blog post: Teamwork.

11 2/10/19 - 2/16/19 Worked on both VE and CX this week.
  • VE: Once a fix has been found for a bug, its Phabricator task is moved to the QA column of the VE workboard. It’s then QA’s job to test and verify that the issue has been resolved. (If yes, the issue is moved back to the product owner; if no, the testing results are shared and the issue is put into Stalled/Waiting mode.) This week I tested and verified the fixes for the following VE bugs: T214991, T206231, T213922, T209648, T215741.
  • CX: Tested T120670, which listed several issues with the For Later list, a feature of the Suggestions tab. With testing, was able to replicate one issue and demonstrate (by NOT being able to replicate) the probable resolution of another. Also was able to test and rule out a new issue I thought I’d found.
  • CX: Did more investigation of <math> display issues, then wrote a report about the findings, including a comparison of the HTML structure generated for math formulas (both inline and block) depending on the translation engine used. The report also drew attention to a VE bug that might be playing a role in the <math> display problems. Elena will present it to the triage team at some point.
12 2/17/19 - 2/23/19
  • Did more testing on T120670 and posted the results to the Phabricator page.
  • Now that CX2 is moving out of beta, QA has a lot of issues to re-check before release. Elena is giving some of these to me to check. Started by testing T139457 (support musical score tags in translation) and posting the results on Phabricator.
  • Finished and handed off a regression-testing “checklist” for CX2. It covers basically the same ground as the test cases, but the checklist format is probably a more user-friendly tool for testers who already know the product and don’t need the detailed step-by-step instructions of the test cases.
  • Found a possible bug in the template editor. Elena too had recently spotted a problem with that editor. There's a possibility that both issues reflect a design change rather than being bugs per se. She will clarify with the Language team this week.
13 2/24/19 - 3/02/19
  • Updated the CX2 regression-testing checklist and posted it on the CX2 exploratory test tools page.
  • Completed the wiki page Content Translation/Exploratory Testing Tools. (Well... completed it for now, anyway. It's the kind of page that's meant to grow over time.)
  • Filed bug T217112 (CX2 Table Properties dialog - Styled/wikitable property is not being applied).
  • The music score tag issue I was testing (T139457) split off to a new bug -- T216859. I continued testing in an effort to find out what was causing the page named in the bug to translate as a single block/blob rather than individual paragraphs.In examining the page and others in the same category (with the same translation problem), discovered a wikitext trait that they all had in common. Found and tested many more examples, saw that the wikitext trait was a reliable predictor that a page would be translated as a block/blob, and posted the finding as a comment on T216859.
14 3/03/19 - 3/09/19 Last day of internship - March 4.

Filed VE bug T217618, formatting issues with indented list items.