QA

Welcome to Mozilla Foundation Quality Assurance (MoFo QA)!

You can contact us by either email or on the #qa channel of irc.

Who We Are

There are thousands of Mozilla contributors who download and test nightly builds of Firefox, Thunderbird, Camino and the Mozilla Suite. The main MoFo QA team consist of:

Asa Dotzler (asa)

QA lead, community lead.

Tracy Walker (tracy)

QA engineer, smoketest guru.

Sarah Liberman (sairuh)

QA engineer. Sarah has been poking, prodding and playing with various Mozilla projects since 1999.

Jay Patel (jay)

Talkback guru.

Marcia Knous (marcia)

Project Manager and QA contributor.

What We Do

We currently focus most of our efforts on the Firefox and Thunderbird products. We also work with other projects such as Seamonkey to assist their QA and development teams so that we can maximize resources —such as Bugzilla and Testrunner— as well as minimize duplicated efforts.

Smoketests and BFT's

We smoketest the nightly builds of Firefox and Thunderbird (and sometimes Seamonkey), where smoketests consist of the bare-acceptance/sanity tasks of a product. We run basic functional tests (BFT's) at key points during a project cycle, notably before milestone (alpha/beta, final, etc.) releases, which are broader in scope than smoketests. The aim of a BFT is breadth, not depth, of scope, where as many of the features of a given product are touched.

Verifications, ad hoc usage, regressions

The majority of bugs filed result from ad hoc usage. Verifying such bugs is a great means of more deeply exercising the application as well as a useful way to find regressions.

Localization (l10n). From time to time we have certified localized builds of Firefox and Thunderbird. While this might change (especially with Mister:Home_Page), we have a brief list (for reference) of our Quick QA l10n Checks.

Test development

Just as developers need to create, modify and maintain code, we in QA need to write, update, revamp and recreate (as needed) test plans and test cases —to ensure that what we use, test and investigate in a given application is correct and current! At present we do most of this manually, but are concurrently investigating automation tools for more repetitive, high-level tasks.

What We Use

Bugzilla

We depend on Bugzilla for filing and tracking bugs and features. We frequently use the query tools, both the "Advanced Search" and "Find a Specific Bug" queries. With the bug count reaching 300,000, there are a couple ways to see what's been frequently reported and duplicated:

• Most frequently reported bugs query
• Most recently duplicated bug query

Testrunner

We use Testrunner at http://testrunner.mozilla.org for test development and running and maintaing various types of test runs like smoketests and basic functional tests (BFT's). To view the following test plans you need a Testrunner login.

• Firefox smoketests
• Thunderbird smoketests
• Firefox BFT's
• Thunderbird BFT's

Talkback

When an application crashes, we use Talkback to examine the crash information. A publically available Talkback server can be accessed at http://talkback-public.mozilla.org

Development tools

We also use several development tools for tracking changes (especially useful for narrowing down regression windows!):

• Tinderbox (http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/showbuilds.cgi) to visually display our continuous build system. Great to see who checked in what, the state of the build, as well as quick links to automated performance tests.
• LXR (http://lxr.mozilla.org) to examine the source code.
• Bonsai (http://bonsai.mozilla.org) to narrow down when changes were made.