Bugzilla:QA

QA team

The QA team has been created on July 11, 2005, two days after the release of Bugzilla 2.18.3, to improve the quality of future releases. Bugzilla 2.20, which was released two months later, became our most stable version ever released, with many security bugs fixed. This result has been possible partly thanks to the hard work done by the QA team which found several tens of bugs. But all the testing has been done manually, which required both a lot of time and a lot of people (the QA team had less than 10 members) to test the most important features of Bugzilla.

As repeating the same tests manually again and again for each new release quickly became boring, we decided to automate the process as much as possible using Selenium. For Bugzilla 2.20.x, 2.22.x and 3.0.x, we used test installations on landfill, which are using HTML Selenium scripts. Since Bugzilla 3.2 RC1, the QA team uses Perl Selenium scripts, which offer many advantages over their HTML equivalent.

How to contribute?

As Selenium cannot do everything, and because someone has to write these scripts anyway, we are always looking for new testers. If you are interested in helping us making Bugzilla better and more stable, feel free to join us. The best way to start is to join us in the #qa-bugzilla channel on IRC, or to write to qa@bugzilla.org telling us that you are interested in contributing. Of course, you can also report bugs you discover to b.m.o directly. If you want to help with automated tests, you are highly encouraged to read below, and download our existing test scripts.

Since mid-2006, the QA team uses a Testopia installation (basically, Bugzilla with the Testopia extension) to track testing progress and to let us easily manage remaining tests to do. That's a great tool to help us work efficiently, avoiding testing what has already been (automatically) tested. We still run some tests manually, despite more and more of them are converted to Selenium scripts (and to be honest, the number of tests to run manually now is close to zero). If you don't know how to write Selenium scripts, you can still help us either by writing new testcases, or by running existing ones manually. If you prefer to write Selenium scripts, that's even better!

Running Selenium scripts

Till Bugzilla 3.0.x, Selenium tests were all written in HTML, which were the executed from a web browser. It has been decided for Bugzilla 3.2 RC1 and newer to convert them to Perl, giving us more flexibility and control. We no longer write test scripts in HTML.

All our current Selenium scripts can be downloaded using bzr. For instance, to download Perl scripts for Bugzilla 3.4, type:

bzr co bzr://bzr.bugzilla.org/selenium/3.4

Other available branches are listed here.

Users having write access to our bzr repository must use this command:

bzr co bzr+ssh://your_login@bzr.bugzilla.org/var/www/html/bzr/selenium/3.4

where your_login is your user account name on landfill.

Note: Do not expect the HTML scripts to work as is. They were based on a given test installation on landfill having some given user accounts, products, components and parameters, and so they won't run on a fresh test installation. They are only available so that you can see what we did till Bugzilla 3.0.

Bugzilla 3.2 and newer have a script named config/generate_test_data.pl which populates your fresh new installation automatically so that you can run our Selenium and WebService tests yourself on your own installation.

Note 1: your Bugzilla installation must already exists, and you must already have configured most important parameters (such as the urlbase, cookiepath, and mail_delivery_method* parameters (* set it to 'Test' ideally, unless you really want to get bugmail)).

Note 2: Before running generate_test_data.pl, make sure that you set parameters in config/selenium_test.conf correctly. This configuration file must match your local configuration, especially the url to your installation (urlbase), as well as the path to your browser (Selenium RC 1.0.1 works like a charm with Firefox 3.5). If you set mail_delivery_method to 'Test', you can define fake user accounts in the config file.

Once the DB is populated, you can start the Selenium server and run our scripts located in t/. To start the Selenium server, you can either run config/selenium_server_start.t (which requires the Alien::SeleniumRC Perl module to be installed) or you can type:

java -jar /path/to/selenium-server.jar

which is exactly what Alien::SeleniumRC is doing. If you didn't install Alien::SeleniumRC, then you must extract selenium-server.jar from the Selenium RC ZIP file (generally, the JAR file provided by SeleniumRC is more recent than the one found in Alien::SeleniumRC). To run the scripts, go into the t/ directory and type:

prove -v --timer *.t

-v will make the output verbose and --timer will display the time it takes to run each script. Both options are optional. Note that you must have the Test::WWW::Selenium Perl module installed in order to have the scripts to run as it will be the interface between Perl and Selenium!

Writing Selenium scripts

The fastest way to write new Selenium scripts is to use the Selenium IDE extension for Firefox. It records all your actions and converts them into a valid Selenium script. You can also write Selenium scripts manually with a text editor, but this is longer and can be pretty painful.

Each command is of the form $sel->command_name_ok('field', 'value', 'description'), where $sel is the test object created by Test::WWW::Selenium. The description is optional, but may give some useful information.

Selenium scripts being under development/review can be found in open bugs depending on bug 3065. Those shouldn't be considered as "safe" till they are available via bzr. If you want to submit a script, please file it here, which is the Bugzilla installation used by the QA team.

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