Explains development practices of the XWiki open source project

1. 27 au 29 mars 2013
Developing XWiki
Vincent Massol
XWiki Committer
CTO XWiki SAS
Vincent Massol, May 2017

2. Vincent Massol
• Speaker Bio
• CTO XWiki SAS
• Your Projects
• XWiki (community-driven open source project)
• Past: Maven,Apache Cargo,Apache Cactus, Pattern Testing
• Other Credentials:
• LesCastCodeurs podcast about Java news
• Creator of OSSGTP open source group in Paris
• 3 books: JUnit in Action, Maven:A Developer’s Notebook, BBWM

3. Agenda
• XWiki?
• Project stats
• Motivation
• Flow overview
• Governance
• Roadmap
• Develop
• Communication
• Build & CI
• Tests
• Releases
• Future
Source: http://dev.xwiki.org

4. What is XWiki? (1/2)
• A structured open source enterprise wiki

5. What is XWiki? (2/2)
• A platform for developing content-based web applications

6. Project Stats
Source: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/ProjectHealth

7. Motivation
• Change the world!
• Needs impact
• Needs max number of users
• Open source
• Needs to show progress
• Release often
• Needs developers / contributors
• Community-driven
• Requires Time-boxing
• XWiki releases every month (3
weeks for RC1, 1w for final)
• Requires integration between all
parts
• Requires CI tool
• Requires quality-control
• Requires automated Tests
• Requires releases as automated as
possible
• Requires automated Build
• Requires good communication

8. Flow overview
Source: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/DevelopmentPractices#HGeneralDevelopmentFlow

9. Governance
• Complete separation from
XWiki SAS and XWiki.org
• Only individuals working on the
open source project
• Rules similar to the ASF
• Committership, voting (0, +1, -1),
lazy consensus
• xwiki.org governance and
company advertising:
sponsoring companies
Source: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/Governance

10. Roadmap
• Time-boxed releases every month (3w RC and 1w final)
Source: http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Roadmaps/

11. XWiki Days
• Every Thursday
• Examples
• Bug Fixing Day (BFD)
• Test Improvement Day
• Deprecation Fixing Day
• Improvement Fixing Day
• Doc Improvement Day
• Pull Request Day
• Worked really well for BFD
Source: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/XWikiDays

12. Develop
Gather/Create
Specifications
Developer 1 Developer 2 Developer 3
Create JIRAs
Code
Test
Document
Associate to
releases

13. Communication
• Mailing lists (users, devs, notifs)
• 15 messages / day on users+devs
• IRC for discussions
• But all important messages must
go through the list
• Commit emails + JIRAs + daily
wiki activity on the notifications
list
• Code review
Source: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/MailingLists & http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/Chat

14. Build
• Maven-based with several custom plugins
• Active Quality vs Passive Quality. Examples:
• Checkstyle with additional custom rules
• Verify that Script Services are not located in the internal package
• Verify that @since javadoc tags have the correct format
• Verify header licenses
• Backward compatibility checks with revapi
• Enforcer checks
• Verify we don't use Commons Logging or Log4j (since we use SLF4J)
• Verify that Test Percentage Coverage don't go down
Source: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/Building

15. Continuous Integration
• Some jobs with -Pquality profile to perform
Quality checks
• Catching false positives before sending mail.
Examples:
• JVM crash
• GitHub connection issue
• X Display not ready for UI tests
• Display screenshot of failing test in job report
• Started using Jenkinsfile for xwiki-contrib
• Pipeline Job to generate full TPC
Source: http://ci.xwiki.org/

16. Tests (1/3)
• Unit tests: JUnit + Mockito
• Integration tests with automatic component testing and
injection. Custom JUnit @Rule
• Functional UI tests with JUnit + Selenium/WebDriver
• Page Object strategy
• WCAG tests
• HTML5 validity tests
• Manual tests (performance + QA @ XWiki SAS
• Total TPC = 73.2%
Source: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/Testing

17. Tests (2/3) - Manual Tests
Source: http://test.xwiki.org

18. Tests (3/3) - Manual Tests

19. Backward Compatibility Strategy
• Check in the build with Revapi
• When wanted failure, add to
ignore list in pom.xml
• @Deprecated then move to
Legacy module using AspectJ
• Use @Unstable + @Since for
young APIs
• Custom checkstyle check in build to prevent @Unstable from staying more
than 1 cycle
• {{backwardCompatibility}} xwiki macro in release notes
Source: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/DevelopmentPractices#HBackwardCompatibility

20. Release Process
• Ongoing Release Notes and
reference documentation
• Marked in JIRA with 2 custom
fields
• Rolling Release Managers
Source: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ReleasePlans/
• Create Release Plan for the release

21. Release Plans (1/2)
Source: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ReleasePlans/

22. Release Plans (2/2)
• Release in JIRA
• Check that all issues are
documented
• Check Release Notes
• Import translations
• Build the Release
• Create mail
announcement
• Push to Maven Central
• Update Docker official
image
• etc
Source: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ReleasePlans/ReleasePlan845

23. Future on dev processes
• XWiki Foundation to officially separate open source project
from XWiki SAS company
• CI functional tests executing on various environments inside
Docker containers
• Work on reducing flaky tests number
• Automate performance tests
• Unbreakable build with automatic merge on Release branch
when CI jobs passes (using Pipeline)

24. Q&A
Me