Software Quality
Charles Fishman wrote a terrific article They write the right stuff. [1] for Fast Company magazine in 1996 about the "on-board shuttle group" that works at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX producing some of the most sophisticated and error-free software in the world.
We'll try to focus on some best practices and quality metrics - especially as it relates to MediaWiki.
Cliff notes for process at WMF edit
- Development_guidelines provides the big picture of policies (MUST) and guidelines (SHOULD).
- Manual:Coding_conventions/PHP covers aspects of how PHP for MediaWiki is coded.
- Code Stewardship is a model adopted in 2018 by WMF as a layer on top of Developers/Maintainers
- Manual:Mwdocgen.php generates the Doxygen output, but the Manual:Coding conventions/PHP doesn't mention anything about comments for static analysis
- Hook container with strong types and DI (solved) is part of a series of architecture shifts, and is an example of diving into the details of the codebase.
- API:Client_code/Gold_standard is somewhat interesting - a series of metrics and principles applied to the API Clients listed at API:Client_code
Code Health - project edit
MediaWiki Code Health (inactive as of 2024 - was active from 2017-2019 and is still part of the CI process and tools.)
The Codehealth Pipeline is part of the continuous integration process, and invokes SonarScanner which send results to SonarCloud (by "SonarQube" a product of SonarSource github).
SonarCloud is pretty cool because it gives a browseable UI to Static analysis (so code coverage and more). You can browse / search for Gerrit-hosted extensions at https://sonarcloud.io/organizations/wmftest/projects
Although useful, it is unclear to the outside observer how much the tool is actively configured to align with best practices or matches up with the other internal / free software tools utilized by WMF (e.g. https://doc.wikimedia.org/#testing). Some background info is at mw:Continuous integration/SonarQube Scanner. According to T379181 there is ongoing work to update WMF repos to use the tool, and also to configure the tool to generate the warnings or gating criteria during Continuous Integration According to T373098, as of late 2024 SonarQube only analyzes Unit Tests, while https://doc.wikimedia.org/cover-extensions/ is used to report on both Unit Tests and Integration Tests.
A list of the extensions / repos that are currently scanned: T321837
SonarCloud Dashboards edit
The WMF organization account on SonarCloud is at https://sonarcloud.io/organizations/wmftest/projects Individual repos are like https://sonarcloud.io/project/overview?id=mediawiki-extensions-DiscussionTools
- ↑ Fishman, C. (2017, September 8). They write the right stuff. Fast Company. https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
