Litmus/QAC session notes from the Summit
Posted 3 months, 2 weeks ago at 11:32. 0 comments
I’ve added the notes from the Litmus/QAC session directly to the Session Proposal page.
I wasn’t really planning on giving a session, but I was pleased to see it well attended. It was nice to meet Wayne (whose recently picked up the Thunderbird QA torch from Gary), Henrik who has been very active in Bugzilla as of late, and Emily, who has been doing fantastic work testing for Mozilla while working for Sun China over the last few years.
It’s also probably a good time to mention that I’m going to be phasing out my involvement with Litmus over the next few months. I’ve officially been a member of the release team for the better part of a year now, and Litmus support and development has suffered as a result, especially since Zach has also been busy with school. I’m pleased to announce that the Mozilla Webdev team will be taking over Litmus development in my stead.
This is bittersweet for me. I’ve been involved with Litmus since it’s inception — we borrowed the name from Zach’s WIP tool, but it really bears no resemblance to that original Testrunner-derivative — and it was one of the prime reasons for my joining Mozilla 3 years ago. However, nothing is worse than a stagnant tool. These days I’m full up with release duties (2.0.0.17 anyone?), unittest work, and now graph server bugs, and don’t have any time to make forward progress on bug fixes, much less features. Despite heavy personal and professional investiture in the code, I’m glad to have Litmus move under the auspices of the Webdev team where it will finally see some development love. If only we’d had a Webdev team 3 years ago!
To properly set expectations here, nothing much will change with Litmus in the near-term. The Webdev team is very busy, and likely won’t have time to pickup Litmus bugs for a few months. In the meantime, I’ll continue to address critical and blocker bugs, but the Mozilla QA team (specifically Marcia) is going to take over Litmus bug triage, effective immediately.
She’ll be using a different set of criteria than I was for triage, namely what features would actually be useful for the QA team, rather than what changes are actually possible for me to fix with very limited time. If you’ve been holding off on filing a Litmus bug due to lack of forward progress, it might be a good time to revisit those requests so that the Webdev team can get a better picture of what people need once they are ready to take on that work.
