Auto-tools/Projects

Welcome to the Automation and Tools Projects Page.

We are the people who write the code that enables all our automated test systems (correctness, performance etc) to run. We are continually expanding, upgrading, and inventing new and better ways to do automated quality analysis at Mozilla. Most of our systems run on a per-checkin basis, and at the time of this writing we do roughly 300 checkins a day, and we run hundreds of thousands of tests per checkin, so you can imagine how many times our code gets run. If you like the idea of that kind of a challenge, we could use your help on some of the projects below. If you don't know how to get started, feel free to hop on irc (irc.mozilla.org), into the channel #ateam and ask some questions.

The Goals

Every calendar quarter, we figure out how best to support Mozilla's efforts and translate that into a set of goals. Most of our goals these days have tracking bugs. So if you want to directly help us the most, look through those tracking bugs and find a bug you can start hacking on. Ask in #ateam if you need help.

2014

Goal List	Post-Mortem	Notes
Current Quarter: 2014 Q1

2013

Goal List	Post-Mortem	Notes
2013 Q4	Awaiting scheduling	Pulled together the highest priority items into the "top list" on goals page to help focus
2013 Q3	2013 Q3 Postmortem	Quarter felt very unfocused, company wide goals done differently, had some impact on us.
2013 Q2	No postmortem performed
2013 Q1	No postmortem performed

Other Projects

Every quarter there are more things we'd like to do than we have time for. Below are some of these projects, broken down by areas and technologies so that you can find something that gets you excited.

Overview

Work in progress effort to create an index for all existing/WIP automation tools - Here.

Firefox OS

The Firefox OS (aka B2G) project is to create an OS for a mobile phone based on the web platform. Our job is to both automate the OS tests and make the OS itself easily testable so we can ensure a very high quality bar. Building and working with an OS is not for the feint of heart; it is a moving platform where many things change all the time. It's helpful to have very good debugging skills, deep knowledge of JavaScript, working knowledge of Python and some C++/build system internals.

• Future work we would like to get a jump on

Firefox for Android

The Firefox for Android project is a continual expansion of our test harnesses to better support the Android platform. Currently we only release Firefox on that platform (aka Fennec), but we might also begin testing web apps there in the near future. Familiarity with Android and a great knowledge of Python is very useful here.

• Attempt to run our automated tests using the awesome work done with Android emulators in bug 910092
• Help expand our reach to x86 Android systems by aiding us in debugging and fixing test failures on that platform: see the collection of bugs beneath bug 891959

Firefox Desktop and General Automation Support

The desktop web browser Firefox continues to be our flagship product, and there is always ongoing work needed to ensure that we continue to support the new features that regularly land in Firefox. Many of the bugs here are more tractable simply because the test harnesses and tests involved are older code. This is a good spot for first-time contributors. These will involve Python knowledge and some JavaScript, depending on the bug.

• Complete the fixes required to deploy Structured Logging
• Expand our QA automation infrastructure to test about-to-release and localized versions of Firefox

Performance

We also maintain all the systems and the code that perform per-checkin testing on performance. There are many performance automation systems at Mozilla, and one of our current efforts is to pull them under one high-level dashboard. Performance will demand a working knowledge of the web, Python, JavaScript, statistics, and great debugging skills.

• Help out with creating that dashboard

Tools & Dashboards

We create web-based tools and dashboards to help illustrate how our automation is doing. Datazilla is a performance dashboarding system, and TBPL surfaces the status of our automation runs. We also maintain and continually improve Mozilla's Bugzilla installation, often contributing patches to the upstream general Bugzilla project. Python, JavaScript, and, in Bugzilla's case, Perl, are all used here, along with both relational and NoSQL databases.

• Help create the next version of TBPL, code named Treeherder
• Help us out with these Datazilla UI papercuts
• Help out with Pulse, our message-queuing system
• Help out with bugzilla.mozilla.org
• Uncover trends and patterns by analyzing our failure trends in Ouija
• Help create a tool to triage mozilla performance alerts

Mentored Bugs

These bugs are things that we have identified as great starter bugs. Each bug contains a focused technology that is required and a mentor who has volunteered to help out people starting to work on the issue. If you've done a few mentored bugs, talk to your mentors about becoming a mentor yourself!

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For reference, the old Projects Page (which is largely out of date, but interesting for historical reasons) is accessible here