This talk is about the one-year-old testing and Quality Assurance effort for Wikipedia run by the Wikimedia Foundation. I will discuss the history and background of two testing projects as well as the current state of the practice.
One aspect of this practice is a completely open world-class browser test automation project using the best tools and practices available today. Not only are the tools open source, but the implementation is completely open as well, from the source code to the Jenkins configuration to the real-time test results. Anyone may contribute-- from analyzing test failures, to adding scenarios to be tested, to writing code.
The other aspect of the practice is Exploratory Testing by the greater Wikipedia community and the software testing community. We have synchronous and asynchronous test events, open test environments, and encourage participation by anyone to help test Wikipedia features. Note that contributions by exploratory testers to the automation project are made possible by using an Acceptance Test Driven Development framework, so non-programming people can contribute scenarios to be tested to the automation project.
I founded the QA/testing practice in early 2012. One year later, the testing projects are mature enough to be of interest to the greater software testing and software development community. That these projects are completely open means that they may serve as examples of good practice and good implementation from which others may learn and to which others may contribute.
