QA/MergeCompatibilityTesting
Merge Compatibility Testing
Introduction
The fast release cycle has proven to be challenging to validate platform and web compatibility from release to release. Regressions are more likely to occur undetected than in the prior longer release model prior to shipping Firefox 5. To get a better assessment of Firefox compatibility, QA in conjunction with our testing community and with outsourced testing partners have been building up experience and expertise in conducting both web and platform compatibility test runs.
Objective
The objecting of the Merge Compatibility Project is to perform a comprehensive set of regression tests for both web and platform compatibility across the current Firefox release channels. Web compatibility refers to crowd-sourced manual tests of the most visited global web sites and perform user based scenario interactions. The selected web sites are grouped by functionality. For instance if it is a financial site, the objective would be for a tester to log into to the site a perform an actual transaction and verify the results of the transaction. If it is a music site, the tester should select and play an audio file on the site and so on. The objective is detect deeper issues that may arise for a realistic user interaction with the sites features, pages and capabilities.
The objective of platform compatibility is to ensure Firefox behaves correct across the spectrum of supported hardware and platform configurations. Historically we have relied on our test community to provide the coverage of testing across the matrix of hardware platforms and supported OSes. This reliance has proven to lack completeness and therefore requires a different approach. The proposed approach is to use an outsource vendor (Ibeta) to supply the machines and configurations which to run graphics and targeted OS compatibility tests.
Implementation
The merge compatibility testing will be conducted on each release channel (nightly, aurora and beta) 3-4 weeks following a channel software merge event. The compatibility testing is broken down into two distinct focus areas. The first area is web compatibility testing using a crowd-sourced approach.