User:Mevans/GTAC2010TalkAbstractV1

Crowd Source Testing, Mozilla Community Style

Software testing and crowd sourcing are made for each other. The reach of today's web based applications no longer have the cozy boundaries of a retail store kiosk or even a country border. Any program accessible on the web is by definition a global application and requires testing by a global community. Take for example today's modern web browser. A hugely complex software application that rivals the complexity and feature capability of any computer operating system. The user experience of the internet is through a web browser. To become a successful world player in the web browser market you need to ensure your browser correctly renders web pages and media across the landscape of bleeding edge web standards to web pages written when Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first html page decades ago. Add in localization of 70+ languages to complicate things and you are given a testing challenge that could hardly be addressed by traditional in-house QA testing.

Mozilla and its global community has been developing the Firefox browser for over a decade and continues to hold the second position in the global browser market. A dominant success factor can be attributed to the continuous participation of Mozilla's community in testing and giving feedback on Firefox. Mozilla has been utilizing crowd sourcing way before the term was coined. In this talk I will show how Mozilla uses crowd source testing techniques utilizing a nearly million member testing community contributing to the bi-weekly beta releases of the Firefox browser and explore why Mozilla's testing and user communities are at the true heart of it's current and future success.