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November 30, 2006
Gecko 1.9a1 Community Test Day - Friday, December 1, 2006
Apologies for the late notice, but we decided to hold a Community Test day to test "the trunk" this Friday, Dec 1. Details are here.
This test day will be a bit different than testing the "branch", as it is an early alpha of the next Firefox release. Developers have been landing a good chunk of code on the trunk, so there may be instances where things may not look quite right (page layout, for example.) You may especially notice this if you are running the build on the Mac rather than Windows.
This is a great chance to explore this build and help QA identify issues that may not have been uncovered. So please join us tomorrow for a great day of testing!
Posted by marcia at 11:43 AM | Comments (141)
November 28, 2006
Test Tool Spotlight
Mozilla QA uses a collection of test tools to help us ensure that the Firefox browser is operating correctly - from download, install and update to regression test suites and layout verifiers. We are currently working to better automate the tests we have and either extend or create other testing frameworks.
In the upcoming weeks look for blog posts covering the different tools that we are currently using - where they are, what they do and how they can be used - along with links to up to date documentation. From there we will run into more speculative territory and cover various ideas for future projects.
By getting all this information into one location, we hope to encourage discussion and participation in these projects. I think that we can all agree that nobody wants to use a buggy browser. Test tools can be an incredibly powerful way of ensuring that functionality remains consistent from release to release.
Posted by alice at 9:09 AM | Comments (63)
November 22, 2006
Performance Testing
For the last couple of months I've been working on reexamining how we collect performance metrics for Firefox. For those who monitor tinderbox results (in this case for the 1.8 branch, also known as Firefox 2) you may have noticed the mysterious Tp and Ts results. Tp is a test that cycles through a series of web pages collecting page load times while Ts tests the time taken for Firefox to startup. The data sets collected by Tp and Ts are each reduced down to a single number which is then compared to previous runs of the same tests. From that we can determine if performance is getting better or worse with each code check-in.
Performance is always at the forefront of any major Firefox release. It is the first thing that a new user will notice when they load up the browser and we want to ensure that we are as quick as we can be. While the old Tp and Ts tests have helped us greatly in the past they are showing their age.
I've been working to essentially recreate Tp and Ts to use more modern web pages and collect a greater variety of process information - and then send this data to new, prettier graphing software. So far the new performance tests are only for Windows machines, but it is definitely on the radar to get these ported to other operating systems.
Check out the current status (and pretty, pretty graph pictures) of the new performance testing effort here: QA performance testing wiki. For now the tests are only being run on my own machines as the code changes that I've made need to be cleaned up and checked in.
Posted by alice at 2:21 PM | Comments (98)
November 21, 2006
Bug Day Nov. 21st
Connect to irc.mozilla.org and "/join #bugday" and help out with Bug Day. Please see http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_QA_Community:Bug_Day#Topic_of_the_Day for details or just stop by the irc channel to see what's up.
Bug Day is run in a few small session. Choose the one convenient for you:
*East Asia/Australia session: 8pm-10pm in Tokyo, Japan gmt+9
*Europe/Africa session: 8pm-10pm in Paris, France gmt+1
*Americas session: 9pm-11pm in N.Y., NY. gmt-5, 6pm-8pm in San Francisco, CA. gmt-8
Hope to see you there,
tracy
Posted by twalker at 3:58 AM | Comments (90)
November 8, 2006
Another call for Firefox/Thunderbird Vista testers
We have a number of bugs related to Windows Vista that we will be landing over the next several weeks. This bug tracks the progress of many of those bugs.
We like to build up an array of folks interested in testing on the Vista landscape. If you are interested, please email marcia@mozilla.org. I will be creating a Vista testers alias that we can use to inform folks when we need help testing.
As always, thank you for you help in testing Firefox and Thunderbird!
Posted by marcia at 3:08 PM | Comments (103)
November 7, 2006
Last minute Bugday reminder
Just a little last minute reminder to come join in on Bug Day. Connect to irc.mozilla.org and "/join #bugday"
= Topic of the Day =
'''Tuesday, Nov. 7th, 2006'''
*Back to Basics: Help for those new to bugzilla.
*Triage unconfirmed bugs filed on Firefox trunk. Use this bug list.
Next week: Continue triaging unconfirmed trunk bugs.
Regional schedule:
*East Asia/Australia session: 8pm-10pm in Tokyo, Japan gmt+9
*Europe/Africa session: 8pm-10pm in Paris, France gmt+1
*Americas session: 9pm-11pm in N.Y., NY. gmt-5, 6pm-8pm in San Francisco, CA. gmt-8
Posted by twalker at 4:02 AM | Comments (66)