2009-02-17 - Semantic and mediawiki discussion notes

[James Laska]

Greetings,

Mel Chua and I spoke in #olpc-meeting on Tuesday about using semantic +
mediawiki (http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki) for
test case/result mgmt.  Mel was kind enough to bring me up to speed on
the setup and extensions required to get semantic up and running.  The
laptop.org test crew have been using this setup to track testing against
several releases now.

The full meeting minutes are available at
http://meeting.laptop.org/olpc-meeting.log.20090217_0911.html

Discussion highlights include ...

A high level description of the process is available at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Semantic_MediaWiki.

The process for creating a new test case -
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Creating_new_test_cases

The process for reporting test results -
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Reporting_test_results

Several sample test plans include:
 * http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_cases_8.2.1
 * http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_cases_8.2.0

Pros:
      * It's very flexible
      * Uses same wiki authentication
      * Forms extension makes contributing structured test results
        easier (rather than editing raw wiki)
      * Building semantic queries is *awesome*
              * "Show me all the test results for the Browse Activity"
              * "Show me all the Activities that passed test X for these
                3 builds"
      * Built in table-sort provided by mediawiki

Cons:
      * it's big
      * it's slow ("extensions are pretty heavy loaders")
      * SMW syntax has a learning curve (for queries, forms etc...)

If I could do it over again ...
      * I might start with a separate wiki just for test results.  That
        way the main wiki wouldn't be affected by the load of the
        extensions.
      * I would write a test workflow before starting to implement the
        system, so it'd be less haphazard.
      * I would *not* use subpages for test categories (e.g.
        Tests/Network/100XOs/DLinkRouter/WhileStandingOnOneFoot/WearingYellowShirts).  Instead use categories
      * I would have and designate a few people to be Keepers of The
        Test System
      * I would definitely have a more formal rollout of the system.

Thanks,
James

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