New Hire Documentation

This document was created as a supplement to the New Hire Document For QA

Tools and Processes

• QA Lab There is a QA lab in Mountain View on the second floor (right next to the kitchen) that has a variety of hardware that we test with. All members of the QA team automatically have badged access to the room, but if you are a new hire you may still need to request access.
• Tinderbox Build
• Bugzilla Mozilla’s own bug tracking software. We dogfood this application and use it to keep track of all of our issues and sometimes to manage projects as well. If the issue needs to be visible, it needs to be in Bugzilla.
  • QA Wanted This is a flag used in Bugzilla to have QA perform a branch check (they will specify if they want to check something older than the latest stable).
  • VerifyMe This flag is used in Bugzilla to have QA verify that a patch truly fixed the issue. These tasks are usually given to contractors.
• TBPL A tool, called Tinderboxpushlog, that correlates checkins with Buildbot results so that developers and sheriffs can quickly see the results of automatic builds and tests for specific change sets. TBPL has been replaced by Treeherder.
• Gaia The user interface layer of the Firefox OS Platform. Any part of the user interface that is drawn on the screen is done thrgouh the Gaia. Gaia is implemented entirely in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It interfaces witht he underlying operating system through open Web APIs, which are implemented through the Gecko layer.
• Gecko The Firefox OS application runtime. This is the layer that provides all of the support for HTML, CSS and JAvaScfipt. It makes sure that those APIs work on every OS that Gecko supports. Gecko many layers including, but not limited to, a networking stack, graphics stack, layout engine, a JavaScript virtual machine and porting layers.
• Gonk Gonk is the lower level operating system of the Firefox OS platform. It consists of a Linux kernel (based on the Android Open Source Project) and a userspace hardware abstraction layer (HAL). Basically, one could say that Gonk is a very simple Linux distribution. Gonk is a porting target of Gecko.
• B2G B2G is short for Boot To Gecko which is a project a complete, standalone operating system in build for the Web. It is built entirely using web technologies (HTML/CSS/JavaScript).
• Flame This is the first generation reference device for Firefox OS.
• Nexus 5 This is going to be the second generation reference device for Firefox OS. More to come.
• Firefox OS Mozilla’s offering for a mobile operating system. It is built completely on web technologies creating an innovative ecosystem for developers and gives users a choice.
• Marionette
• Marionette JS
• Gaia-try
• Buildbot
• Sheriffing
• Tree Herder Treeherder is the successor to TBPL. The purpose of Treeherder is to support longer term use-cases for managing and visualizing data and rewrite the existing application from scratch, so that it can scale appropriately in the future. It was created as a way to address some pain points with TBPL.
• Task Cluster
• Mozilla Central
• Milestones (Release)
• Jenkins
• Image Compare

Glossary

• Kernel Panic
• ...On Device
• ...On Desktop
• G.I.P
• G.I.J
• Shallow Flash
• Full Flash
• QAnalyst
• Regression Window
• Smoke Test
• Nightly
• Nomination
• Functional Team
• Blocker
• Feature Landing
• Feature Complete
• Dogfood
• Triage Bug triage is a process in which bugs are prioritized to be fixed. The bugs are sorted into categories like critical and non-critical to manage the inward flow of issues and to make sure the proper issues are being worked on at a given time.