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 (and Netscape products since 1994).

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), here's a brief list (for reference) of our Quick QA l10n Checks. Note that this section might move if/when a l10n wiki becomes available.

For Firefox:

• installation, new profile, migration
• default homepage to Google
• search bar: Google, Yahoo (unless otherwise approved by Marketing)
• About dlg: date, version
• Help window
• Themes / Extensions dlg (just ensure they appear, with Themes listing the default)
• Bookmarks: NO crew picks! but other locale-specific ones OK
• sidebar: history / bookmarks
• go to another webpage
• Preferences/Options window
• view source
• quickly view menu items and/or couple of context menus
• find toolbar
• check about:config for app.update.url string: it should point to <locale>.rdf, not en-US.rdf
• check for Talkback

For Thunderbird:

• installation, new profile, migration
• all basic windows:
  • main 3pane
  • mail compose
  • mail standalone
  • view source
  • address book; also check AB card dialog
• About dlg: date, version
• Help window
• Themes / Extensions dlg (just ensure they appear, with Themes listing the default)
• Mail Account Settings dialog
• Preferences/Options window
• quickly view menu items and/or couple of context menus
• check for Talkback

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.