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Posted 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.
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Current Tunes: Above & Beyond - Trance Around The World 277 - Anhken - 2008-08-01 | Filed under Firefox, Litmus, Mozilla, QA
Posted 2 months, 1 week ago at 10:53. 1 comment
I’ve spent the last day or so updating the existing Selenium test suite for Litmus in advance of landing the new cloning code for bug 362489.
In the past, testing with Selenium has entailed firing up Firefox 2 because the Selenium IDE had not yet been updated to work with the Firefox 3 betas/release candidates. I was pleasantly surprised yesterday to find a new version 1.0 beta 2 available for download that has been updated to support Firefox 3. Not a moment too soon either!
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Current Tunes: The Irresistible Force - It's Tomorrow Already | Filed under Litmus, Mozilla, QA, Software
Posted 6 months, 3 weeks ago at 21:30. 1 comment
In case you weren’t following the stream of curses in IRC last Thursday — alternately, robcee and myself cursing at buildbot slaves, and developers cursing at us — clobber support for the buildbot unit test machines has landed. My apologies for the disruption it caused. The payoff is that developers can now clobber unit test machines via CVS in a similar manner to the build machines. Each improvement makes these very fragile machines a little less touchy, and allows us to be more hands-off with them.
All the clobbering self-help instructions can be found in the wiki.
Current Tunes: Digitalism - Zdarlight | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla, QA
Posted 7 months ago at 20:57. 0 comments
Ah, there’s always an Irish proverb to fit the bill (especially if the bill happens to be a bar tab).
There are 4 new unit test buildbot slaves in the mix:
- qm-leak-centos5-01
- qm-leak-macosx-01
- qm-leak-winxp01
- qm-leak-w2k3-01
These machines are a little different: they’re producing debug builds and are running the standard suite of unit tests (reftest, mochitest, mochichrome, and browser chrome), but they are doing so with trace-malloc, bloat, and leak logging enabled as well.
These unit test build machines are currently reporting to the MozillaTest tinderbox tree. Jeff Walden has had a preliminary look at the output, but the tests still remain chronically red/orange. What we need now are more eyeballs to compare the failures we’re seeing on these boxes with the output of the same tests on the unit test machines reporting to the Firefox tree to tease out the legitimate failures and get bugs filed.
If you are interested in helping, you can find more information about debugging memory leaks at the Mozilla Developer Center.
Current Tunes: Gabriel & Dresden - Essential Mix - 2003-03-09 | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla, QA
Posted 9 months, 1 week ago at 22:35. 0 comments
I’m not even supposed to be here today, but I just had to write a little something about the Firefox 3 Beta 1 test day that we ran last week.
Tomcat says that some of the European tech press picked up our testday announcement, and it certainly showed. Lots of new faces in #testday, and over 1300 test results filed by the community over the course of the day (another 270 if you add results from Mozilla QA staff). This was even more impressive considering that this was the second test day we held last week. In the past we’ve seen an attendance drop-off if we hold events too close together.
People seem genuinely stoked about Firefox 3. Lots of testing remains to be done, so I hope to see a lot of those folks back to help some more. Keep it locked to QMO for details.
Current Tunes: The Orb - Bedouin | Filed under Litmus, Mozilla, QA
Posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago at 15:06. 5 comments
I had the privilege of attending FSOSS last week.
This is a great open source conference put on by the people at Seneca college in Toronto. The conference is now in its second year, and is priced right to actually allow many smaller open source ventures or individuals to attend. I even got the opportunity to talk to a few high school students who were able to attend because the price point didn’t overwhelm their nascent interest. But I digress…
One of the major themes this year was building community and the various problems inherent therein. Even Microsoft sent a speaker, Bryan Kirschner, to discuss how Microsoft is trying to build a community around its own open source efforts. Regardless of whether you trust Microsoft’s initiatives or not, I respect Bryan a lot for coming into what has traditionally been a very hostile environment and trying to rally support without being defensive.
A lot of projects — e.g. Microsoft, OpenKomodo, Miro — are just starting (relatively speaking) to build their communities. They’re dealing with issues that are a little different than ours: how do I attract people to my project vs. project X? Some of these projects have the added benefit of being newer and/or flashier than us (Miro). Some of the projects will be effectively capped by their target audience (OpenKomodo). Microsoft just has to get past 25 years of bad blood. 
Mozilla shares the recruitment problem of these other projects, but increasingly our problem is also one of retention: how do we keep the testers we already have (many of the newer projects *are* seductive), and how do we embrace new people who do show up to help and not scare them away?
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Current Tunes: Stereo MC's - Playing With Fire | Filed under Mozilla, Open Web, QA
Posted 10 months, 1 week ago at 11:26. 0 comments
I’m adding my name to the growing list of Mozilla people attending FSOSS 2007 in Toronto at the end of October. I missed out on FSOSS last year, and everyone involved seems to have had a blast. It’s rare to have a relevant conference within VIA1 striking distance of Ottawa, so I’m taking a stab this year.
What will I be doing? Well, first and foremost, the Mozilla QA team has a testday scheduled for the Friday, Oct. 26th with a focus on OS Integration on Vista & Mac, with a secondary focus on Installer testing. Between sessions, I’ll be plugging into testday, and hopefully leading an impromptu remote testday in conjunction with Club Moz @ Seneca. It’s no secret that Seneca has also been a fruitful recruiting ground for us in the past, so I’ll also be chatting with students and generally trying to get people excited about plugging in to the Mozilla community.
Hope to see lots of folks there.
Posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago at 11:32. 5 comments
I’m in the process of wading into the Mozilla Buildbot story. It’s a little murky, and things seem to be trying to grab my ankles, but otherwise the water looks strangely familiar so far.
Tinderbox is a bit of a beast, have no doubt. Much of the base code remains unchanged since I first interacted with it in 1998, but we’ve made some key improvements “recently.” Things like automatic config updating from CVS and CLOBBER support have reduced our Tinderbox maintenance substantially, and need to find their way into our Buildbot setup ASAP (bugs are on file for as much). Buildbot allows us to do some things in a much smarter way than Tinderbox, but our current Buildbot setup seems like a bit of a step backwards for me maintenance-wise.
I’m happy to bring my experiences with Tinderbox to bear on the problem. Hopefully we can apply those hard-learned lessons and quickly get to a better maintenance state.
Current Tunes: The Orb - DJ Asylum (7" Edit) | Filed under Build/Release, Mozilla, QA
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 13:39. 0 comments
Litmus will be offline for a few hours tonight as I land the test run changes. There should probably be an “at long last” in that last sentence, but I’m just happy it’s done.
What are “test runs,” you might ask? Test runs allow the men and women behind the Mozilla QA curtain to direct the community testing effort a little more effectively than we could previously. We do this by creating what we call a “test run,” which in the context of Litmus amounts to a collection of testgroups that need running, a time frame within which those testgroups need to be run (i.e. a deadline), and a set of configurations that need testing.
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Current Tunes: Erick Morillo - Essential Mix - 2002-09-29 | Filed under Litmus, Mozilla, QA
Posted 1 year, 7 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
