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

See our goals page.

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 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.

• 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
• Help make mozharness easier for external contributors

Performance

The a-team maintains many of the systems and 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, called Perfherder. A working knowledge of the web, Python, JavaScript, statistics, and great debugging skills would be helpful.

• See: Perfherder

Tools & Dashboards

We create web-based tools and dashboards to help illustrate how our automation is doing. Datazilla is a performance dashboarding system, and Treeherder 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 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
• (Mozbench) Help create a cross-browser performance benchmark
• (Mozregression) Help out on a tool used to track down Firefox regressions

ATeam Handbook

The ATeam Handbook is meant to be the definitive source of information on how we do things in the ateam, useful for new and old contributors alike. Currently in the planning phase.

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!

Bugzilla query error

Array ( [type] => error [message] => http-bad-status [params] => Array ( [0] => 406 [1] => Not Acceptable ) ) 1

For reference, the old Projects Page (which is largely out of date, but interesting for historical reasons) is accessible here