Monthly Archives: June 2013

Where it has begun…quality assurance testing

Everyone who has surfed Mozilla website perhaps has seen a link that says: Get Involved. This is the simplest way to start helping, to get all the info and the opportunity to find out what you want to help with. This has been my starting point,too. I choose Quality Assurance and, in particular, Desktop Firefox Team. This team is focused on desktop Firefox testing for upcoming major releases and maintenance releases.

Anyway, the first steps to follow starting with Quality Assurance are:

  • Set up a Bugzilla account
  • Visit the mozilla wiki for how to help, work on some community tasks listed here
  • Join IRC on #qa on irc.mozilla.org or other relevant channels. You’ll find other community members, people who will be happy to answer your question and help you.

Some of the first activity to do are :

  • Come out to a Testday  joining IRC channel at #testday. More information can be found on the QMO Calendar
  • Running developmental builds of Firefox or one of the Firefox channels builds
  • Try to Confirm Unconfirmed bugs or Confirm bugs that are marked as fixed and comment the bug to say they are verified. More info are available in the Bugmasters Projects wiki page.  When you have already confirmed 3 or 4 bugs ask for canconfirm or editbug privileges on IRC or follow the indications listed here.
  • File bugs to help us improve the product (Some guideline to learn how to file bugs are available here).

More info are available in the doc section Here there are all the info about Events, TestDays, Bugzilla…every thing can help you starting.

First Week in OPW

Last week I’ve started my internship for the OPW with Mozilla. My main goal for the internship is to work as Bug Wrangler; What I need to do is helping the Bugmasters community with bug management and triaging under the supervision of Liz Henry, my mentor. Another of my goals is developing a Firefox Addon addressed to QA people, an instrument for helping users of Bugzilla and Mozilla through simple and immediate searches.

QA Activity

This week I’ve focused on bug triaging, I took part at the

  • Unconfirmed Bugs Triage Testday : I have explored the last week filed bugs, tried  to understand them, I’ve completed them with the required info and details, asked questions to the reporter, added testcase, reproduced and assigned them to the right component/product;
  • Partially worked on the mentored bug as explained in Mentored Bugs; I’ve tried to understand if old [good first bug] were still valid or under work of their assignee.
  • WebRTC in Firefox for Android and Firefox for desktop Testday: a testday aimed to support testing the new developer-release versions of Firefox for Android and Firefox on Desktop focusing on the process of discovering, using and testing WebRTC using demo pages and exploratory tests as listed in the testday etherpad

Here there is a report of my activities listing the triage work done, a new filed bug after a crash report, new mentors assigned to old [good first bugs].

Developer Activity

This week I’ve started creating a small sets of functional requirements for my extension. It’s an integration between Bugzilla and Mozilla and so I’ve started exploring

  • Firefox addon-sdk I’ve chosen to develop my Firefox extension
  • Bugzilla WebService and methods exposed to interact with
  • setted up a githup repository with an initial commit of my work until now with a small, initial and test sets of features

During all the week I’ve been on IRC trying to help during and off the testdays to help people approaching QA activities, hoping to be of help for other people like when I started and this work makes me very proud. 🙂

OPW…what is this?

I’ve started this blog talking abut the OPW, Mozilla and the internship I’ll begin soon. But…OPW…What is this?
OPW Poster
OPW stands for Outreach Program For Women and, as the name may imply, it’s a program aimed to provide tech internships to women organized by GNOME Foundation and inspired by Google Summer of Code. This program aims to encourage women to take part in FOSS projects guiding them through their first contributions. It first started with a round in 2006 with the GNOME Foundation, and then resumed in 2010 with editions organized every half a year. Now many other FOSS organizations have joined the program.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is software that gives the user the freedom to use, copy, study, change, and improve it. There are many Free and Open Source Software licenses under which software can be released with these freedoms. FOSS contributors believe that this is the best way to develop software because it benefits society, creates a fun collaborative community around a project, and allows anyone to make innovative changes that reach many people. FOSS contributors do various things: software development, system administration, user interface design, graphic design, documentation, community management, marketing, identifying issues and reporting bugs, helping users, event organization, and translations.[source]

Among the participating organizazions of this round there is Mozilla and this is the organization I’ve applied for.
I’ve always thought that FOSS projects were something for an elite of people: a closed world, difficult to approach. It’s nice to see that OPW has already proved me wrong: I come closer and closer to a community of triagers, developers and users spread throughout the world. I can be part of something, and this will certainly make me a better person on both the personal and professional side.

This world needs human beings, all gender of human beings not only men 🙂