User:MarkAHershberger/Weekly reports/2010-W18

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This weekly report includes the past week and half. This is to compensate for the week and a half that W16 covered and move myself back to write-on-Monday schedule.

Testing
I was able to talk to Pdhanda and Ryan Lane late last week about the plans for setting up automated testing — something that we've all been working on separately. We're planning to meet this Friday to really begin discussion of how to pull this all together.

I suggested (based on some prior experience and its integration with PHPUnit and Selenium) that Continuum would be a good tool to pull all this together. I'll be updating the current Selenium page with information and relevent articles in preparation for our meeting Friday.

Another problem I've been thinking about related to testing is how to test extensions in the SVN repository. I know how to do this manually, but its a very kludgy hack and won't scale at all. Hopefully once we get some sort of automated testing in place there will be more eyes on the problem and an answer will present itself.

Notifications
When I spoke with Tim Starling about the problem of notifying a user about asynchronous, background activities, he said that the MW doesn't have much of a messaging infrastructure.

He pointed me to the LiquidThreads and NewUserMessage modules which both send notifications to the user. I've been working on understanding this code and seeing if there were a way to unify the notification code so that we could have a single, clear method on the User object for sending notifications.

This week I plan on wrapping up that work and making sure that, as I did for the refactoring of Title::getUserPermissionsErrorsInternal, I have good test coverage.