Brief Litmus Downtime Tonight
Posted 1 year, 8 months ago at 10:35. 0 comments
Mozilla IT is performing some maintenance tonight, and Litmus is affected. Downtime should be minimal.
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Litmus Downtime, Take Two - 2007/02/13, 5pm - 6pm PST
Posted 1 year, 9 months ago at 10:10. 0 comments
The scheduled downtime never actually happened last Thursday, so we’re going to try again tomorrow night.
Current Tunes: Run DMC - Run's House | Filed under Litmus, Mozilla
Litmus Downtime - 2007/02/08, 5pm - 6pm PST
Posted 1 year, 9 months ago at 13:55. 0 comments
We’re taking Litmus down briefly this coming Thursday afternoon (Feb. 8th, 2007) to install the VMware tools on the VM. Among other things, this will allow proper time syncing from the host to the VM.
We don’t anticipate an extended outage, but we’re budgeting for an hour from 5pm - 6pm PST just to be safe.
Current Tunes: The Roots feat. Common - Love Of My Life | Filed under Litmus, Mozilla
Litmus Wiki Updated
Posted 1 year, 10 months ago at 10:03. 0 comments
I took advantage of the US holiday yesterday to update the Litmus wiki with the current state of affairs.
I’ve added a top-level Work in Progress section so people can tell at a glance what we (Zach and I) are working on now. More detail is still available in the To-Do List. I’ve also made the Wishlist more obvious. I’ll try to add the existing enhancement request bugs to the wishlist shortly.
There are lots of other little changes: rudimentary breadcrumbs, links to bug lists, and my personal favorite, a stub for a section on Selenium tests for Litmus. I’ve got a small suite of them running now, and can’t wait to add more.
Current Tunes: Orbital - Planet of the Shapes | Filed under Litmus, Mozilla
Test Case Writing Day this Friday
Posted 1 year, 10 months ago at 15:25. 0 comments
We’re changing things up a little bit this week. Our bi-weekly testday is returning after a holiday hiatus, and this time we’re going to be focused on improving test case coverage either by writing new test cases, or by shoring up existing ones.
More information about this testday can be found in the Mozilla wiki.
Axel has even offered to show up to help any l10n contributors improve our somewhat-woeful l10n test case situation.
Hope to see everyone in IRC!
Current Tunes: A Tribe Called Quest - Scenario (Young Nation Mix) | Filed under Litmus, Mozilla, QA
Testdays and testing coverage
Posted 1 year, 11 months ago at 14:26. 0 comments
After having a conversation with Tomcat this morning, I just wanted to clear up a potential point of confusion for our community testers in relation to the testing coverage statistics we provide in Litmus. The chances of seeing high coverage values for subgroups in Litmus increases on testdays when our testing focus is particularly targeted, but there are still several ways to provide helpful testing feedback under those circumstances.
Here’s a simple plan of attack:
- Obviously, the first option is to choose subgroups that don’t yet have 100% coverage;
- Failing that, if you have another machine running a different operating system, try running some tests from that machine if the coverage statistics are lower;
- If we are also testing different locales, download a different locale and use it for testing;
- Try installing an extension or theme (preferably one of the more popular ones), and then test with it installed;
- Regardless of coverage statistics, pick a subgroup that interests you and test it anyway; and finally,
- Pick ANY FUNCTIONAL AREA that interests you and do your own testing around it, regardless of whether this area is covered in Litmus or not. Just be sure to report back to the QA team if you find anything!
Current Tunes: DJ Shadow - What Does Your Soul Lool Like, Pt. 1 | Filed under Litmus, Mozilla, QA
Branch association changes in Litmus
Posted 1 year, 11 months ago at 14:03. 0 comments
I just landed the changes for bug 355278.
These changes address a long-standing underlying architectural problem in Litmus whereby subgroups and testcases were only associated with a given code branch (e.g. Trunk) if they were already contained in a testgroup that belonged to that branch. This presented a chicken-and-egg problem to admins who were trying to add new subgroups or testcases. A workaround did exist, but it wasn’t readily apparent, at least not based on the number of questions I fielded about it.
The solution was to associate subgroups and testcases with branches directly. This does mean that, going forward, testcases will need to be cloned rather than re-used for each branch. In most cases a given testable feature will show some delta between major versions (i.e. branches), and this was how we at Mozilla were using the system anyway.
If you’re running your own Litmus install out there, I’ve provided a migration script in migration/update_branch_relationships.pl, that will do the heavy lifting in terms of mapping existing testgroup->branch relationships over to subgroups and testcases.
Current Tunes: U2 - With or Without You | Filed under Litmus, Mozilla
Firefox Summit Takeaway
Posted 2 years ago at 00:52. 0 comments
Lots of discussion and decision-making last week, only some of which was fueled by well-deserved booze. Here’s a wrap-up of the salient points as they pertain to me.
Build/Release:
- There are lots of releases planned prior to Christmas, although nothing quite as whiz-bang as Firefox 2. I’ll be helping out wherever I can with the various RCs, alphas, and partner builds, even if it’s just to continue handling the daily flood of tinderbox requests so that others don’t have to.
- Continued work to get our Mac tinderbox “ref” platform implemented across all our current tinderboxen, along with integrating the new Intel xserves into the mix when they arrive. Man, I really wish Apple were making this easier for me, but software updates, in conjunction with having multiple Apple build IDs for the same software version, are really biting my ass right now.
QA:
- davel is leaving Mozilla soon and we wish him well. Much of the unit testing work that he was championing will be taken over by robcee. Again, I’ll be helping out where I can, likely wherever interaction with the build team is required. I already have one foot in each camp anyway.
Litmus:
- There was much talk at the summit about where (specifically, on which products) Mozilla should be focusing its energies. Nothing is set in stone yet, but things will be changing. As our product focus changes, we need to be able to uplift community members to continue testing products that we cannot supply adequate QA resources for. This means implementing product-based admin privileges in Litmus, which was on file but not a priority before.
- Zach and I will be improving the new Litmus install story over the next few months to make it as easy as possible for a 3rd party to install Litmus and use it for their own needs. The aim here is to encourage more people to adopt Litmus as a tool and ease our burden of development. There are lots of other build, release, and QA tools that need writing, so I’d love to get Litmus into maintenance mode ASAP.
- Now that I’ve had my ideas for the test runs interface vetted by the QA team, I can plow ahead and get them done. Hooray for in-person whiteboarding!
Current Tunes: Orbital - Lush 3-4 (Warrior Drift Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia) | Filed under Build/Release, Litmus, Mozilla, QA
A Grand (Test)Day Out
Posted 2 years ago at 11:22. 0 comments
Our most recent community testday was a resounding success.
We had around 35 people actively testing, many of whom were joining us for the first time. This was largely due to our collaboration with Seneca college in Toronto. Thanks to all the Seneca students who showed up to help with testing, and thanks to robcee for leading that particular charge.
The testday generated over 1000 results. For those keeping score at home, that’s triple our previous record for testday result submission. We got lots of good coverage on Linux (which is rare for us on testday), and also received lots of valuable feedback on testcases and on Litmus itself. So much feedback, in fact, that I needed to whip up a quick interface to view results with comments in the middle of testday. We also debuted the new report interface for testday statistics after the testday.
Thanks again to everyone who helped make this past testday a success. We hope you’ll decide to come back and join us for the next one.
Current Tunes: Spiritualized - I Think I'm In Love (The Chemical Brothers Remix) | Filed under Litmus, Mozilla, QA
Litmus is back
Posted 2 years, 1 month ago at 07:01. 1 comment
Aravind got a new VM setup for us, and Zach did the heavy lifting while I was away on vacation this week to get Litmus working right using a much more up-to-date version of MySQL and Apache. Let testing commence anew!
Litmus performance has been a bit of a sore point as of late, and we’ve been meaning to move into a VM for a while, so I would be interested to hear people’s observations on the responsiveness of the new setup.
