Software Quality

Charles Fishman wrote a terrific article They write the right stuff. 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

• 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#Comments_and_documentation 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

MediaWiki Code_Health

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).

A list of the extensions / repos that are currently scanned: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T321837

Dashboards

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

Code Health Group - paused, planned to restart in 2024

Code_Health_Group/Quality_Big_Picture

Workboard in Phabricator