QA/Platform/Graphics
Summary
This page holds important information related to testing and quality assurance for Gecko's graphics code.
- About the team
- Major code changes worth tracking
- Inventory of hardware available for testing
- PCI Device ID Catalog (useful for determining hardware make/model)
- Codenames of NVIDIA chipsets
- Information about graphics driver blocklisting
- Draft guides related to Graphics QA
Activities
- Current Activities
- Betabreakers runs sanity tests of major changes at least once during each new Aurora version
- One & Done is used to enable volunteers to participate in sanity testing
- Triage is done daily from 10am to 11am Pacific to ensure effective resolution of critical issues, each day focusing on a different category of issues.
- Past Activities (no longer active)
Android:
- Skia backend update (2015)
Boot2Gecko:
- On-going Sanity Checks (2015)
Firefox:
- Toronto Lab Testing (2015)
Metrics
- Metrics-Graphics: staging, production
- Code Quality: Code Quality, Quality Indices
- Telemetry: GFX, All
- Bugzilla: Bug Age
Understanding the Problem Space
First order of business for my transition to the Graphics team is to understand the problem space so I can understand the immediate needs of the team and make the best impact I can in the shortest amount of time.
- What are the key problems/challenges facing the Graphics team in terms of quality?
- discrepancy in environments between testers and release users
- discoverability of bugs pre-release
- ?...
- Where can QA add value/support to the Graphics team?
- improving pre-release discoverability of bugs
- closing the gap between tester and release systems
- helping with bug triage, particularly with bugs hiding in general components
- representation in crashkill
- improving code coverage and/or identifying gaps in code coverage
- identifying ways to improve participation in the graphics team (events, projects, One & Done, etc)
- documentation of tools, testing processes, etc
- building out the lab in Toronto
- continuing to drive Betabreakers testing every 6 weeks
- verifying bug fixes (what does this look like)?
- profiling areas of risk (eg. troublesome configs)
- conducting root cause analysis for regressions
- understanding problems outside of our control (eg. driver resets)
- feature testing and upcoming priorities (e10s, Windows 10, El Capitain, Android, B2G, etc)
- What does QA need to know to be effective?
- key components of an actionable Graphics bug
- fundamentals/technologies that should be learned
- how to distinguish a graphics crash from a non-graphics crash with a graphics signature
- meetings, mailing lists, bugzilla components to watch, blogs, IRC channels to join, etc
- who is each member of the team (incl. contributors) and what do they do
- where does graphics code reside in the tree?
- what role does Unified Telemetry in graphics quality?
- what are the prefs to enable/disable different functionalities?
- we need a database of known-troublesome hardware/driver configurations to inform testing, hardware acquisitions, and blocklisting
- Understanding the Stability
- How do we identify a graphics crash?
- by signature: gfx, layers, D2D, D3D, ?...
- by topmost filename: gfx, ?...
- by driver (DLL, version, ?...)
- by device/vendor ID?...
- ?...
- How do we prioritize graphics crashes?
- Overall topcrashes in release > beta > aurora > nightly
- Gfx crashes in release > beta > aurora > nightly
- Explosive crashes in release > beta > aurora > nightly
- What tools do we have at our disposal to investigate crashes?
- Bughunter for investigating crashes correlated to a URL
- KaiRo's reports for identifying crashes that are new or escalating quickly
- Socorro for getting detailed information about crash reports
- What information is needed to make a crash actionable by developers?
- Correlations to particular hardware, driver, add-on, 3rd-party software, or library
- ?...
- Participation
- Sanity checking via One & Done
- Meetups to connect testers/users with devs
- Testdays to teach people about graphics testing
- Documentation and translation of documentation
- Engaging on community spaces (Discourse, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc)
- Telemetry
- COMPOSITE_TIME: time in CompositorParent::CompositeToTarget dispatching draw calls and calling SwapBuffers, but not texture upload (ie. complete composition)
Top Issues
Blockers
Bugzilla query error
Array ( [type] => error [message] => http-bad-status [params] => Array ( [0] => 406 [1] => Not Acceptable ) ) 1
Crashes
Bugzilla query error
Array ( [type] => error [message] => http-bad-status [params] => Array ( [0] => 406 [1] => Not Acceptable ) ) 1
Features
Bugzilla query error
Array ( [type] => error [message] => http-bad-status [params] => Array ( [0] => 406 [1] => Not Acceptable ) ) 1
Get Involved
Want to help the Graphics team? Here are some ways you can get involved.