Quality Engineering Blog

[dorin100]

What would be the best tool to use for a Chapter blog?

Some questions:

• who will be the audience? probably QE Chapter + whole IOG
• what functionalities the blog should offer?
  • search option
  • labels for articles
  • anything else?
• visibility - probably private in the beginning (only for IOG)
  • maybe we might use the Wiki section of this repo (that is already private)?

[antonbaliasnikov]

One of the options can be to create a QA Chapter portal with some guides, tutorials, and a blog.

We can use https://docusaurus.io/ for all of this or something similar.

[emiride]

I wanted to suggest free version of stackoverflow for teams, but this docusaurus looks very nice. I think https://playwright.dev is created using this tool? The only problem with this is that we have to take care of hosting it and maintaining it. Maybe it is not a problem?

[paluchs-iohk]

Docusaurus setup is pretty straightforward, yet powerful. @martinseanhunt could do a hosting setup for us, and we won't need to maintain it then. He did the same for Midnight.

[alexromanov]

1. We can use Confluence.
2. We can use a static github.io site from GitHub to build the documentation from the current repo

[paluchs-iohk]

What I miss on confluence is 'code review' process which Docusaurus setup gives.

[dorin100]

A static github.io site would allow a code review option. And we already have this private repo, so it should be private and available only within the IOG org.

[mkoura]

I believe github pages are publicly available even for private repositories.

[mkoura]

https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github-pages/securing-your-github-pages-site-with-https

Warning: GitHub Pages sites are publicly available on the internet, even if the repository for the site is private.

[rsporny]

Before we decide which tool to use, I'd rather like to have a general overview of what type of content are we going to have/produce in QE Chapter. I assume blog will be just a part of that, so we should try to keep it simple, to not end up with many different places/tools. Moreover, we should define the purpose of blog, what kind of content it's gonna have, and what audience are we targeting.

[dorin100]

Excellent point! Let's think about it.

Some usages for a Blog:

• Education - sharing of best practices, test approaches, frameworks, results reporting tools
• Show and Tell
• Results of some experiments
• Increase the flow of ideas inside the Chapter
• Increase the trust in the QE Chapter (team members both inside the company at also in our teams/squads/tribes)
• Increase the knowledge sharing and flow of ideas inside the chapter

what else !?

[dorin100]

Other types of content inside the QE Chapter I can think of:

• results reporting at Squad/Trive/Chapter level - per release, nightly, etc
• test strategies - per tribe/feature
• metrics - test, quality, etc (to be defined)
• processes

[dorin100]

here is a blog example (for usage, topics, etc) - https://testing.googleblog.com/

[paluchs-iohk]

And Docusaurus gives blogging option too...

[alexromanov]

For a free setup, we can use Hugo as a template engine and some plugins, like papermod. The only thing that we need here is hosting on some domains like testing.iog.io.
As for visibility - we need to think about it in advance. If we plan to make it public, we need to publish posts according to our public doc guidelines (without any internals, etc).

[mkoura]

Hugo looks good! And it is already packaged in many Linux distributions and repositories (including nix), which is nice bonus.
In the end, anything that can build static pages from Markdown will suffice. We can host it on github pages, maybe with private domain (administrator of iog.io would just need to setup DNS records for us).

[dorin100]

The only thing that we need here is hosting on some domains like testing.iog.io.

Can we already use something that would not require hosting but at the same time still be in our control?

[paluchs-iohk]

Ask @martinseanhunt for best out-of-the-box solution proposal

[dorin100]

@martinseanhunt is proposing https://vercel.com/templates/next.js/tailwind-css-starter-blog

[angerman]

engineering.IOG.io as well as the cardano updates both use GitHub and Docusaurus actions.

[dnadales]

What about using the same framework we use in https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-updates, Hydra and Consensus.

[dorin100]

can we make that private (only IOG)?

[dnadales]

I don't know. Can you remind me why we want this to be private?

[dorin100]

We might touch on topics that are related to projects or repositories that are not yet open source, or we might discuss experimental or sensitive info that could disclose IOG's confidential info.

As for the blog's exposure, the question of whether it should be public or internal is still up for debate. Personally, I don't perceive a substantial benefit in making it accessible to the public as opposed to keeping it in-house.

[dnadales]

For sensitive information maybe a Wiki in a private repo might be enough. I'd choose that because people are already on GitHub and we don't need to spend money or people's time on additional tools.

[dorin100]

IT is suggesting Confluence Blog functionality.

[coot]

Why not use https://github.com/input-output-hk/engineering?

[coot]

I know this isn't an answer for the original question, but we have both @dorin100 & @angerman in this thread :).

@dorin100 the type of content you mentioned in another thread, fits quite well into the engineering blog that we already have. docusourus allows one to have different topics, which makes it easy to separate the content into different categories. We use it in cardano-updates.

[antonbaliasnikov]

It's the Docusaurus variant I initially proposed here. We can have "Quality" tab.

[paluchs-iohk]

I don't think adding any new fancy tech stack gives that much benefit. Docusaurus alike stack is used already in cardano docs, so why not use it as it is. Simple, yet powerful. And we can have setup pretty out of the box, with pre-prod environment. The content is more important here, not the tech stack.

[dorin100]

I know this isn't an answer for the original question, but we have both @dorin100 & @angerman in this thread :).

@dorin100 the type of content you mentioned in another thread, fits quite well into the engineering blog that we already have. docusourus allows one to have different topics, which makes it easy to separate the content into different categories. We use it in cardano-updates.

I feel the public IOG engineering blog is already a very good tool to share info with the outside.

The Quality Engineering Blog should be used for internal alignment and education on different topics thus it should be private.