mozilla qa home page

by Mozilla QA
(Maintained by Jan Leger and Eli Goldberg)

Who We Are and What We Do

Mozilla Quality Assurance (QA) is a network of countless volunteers from the net community and several dozen Netscape employees. We share the common mission of taming the lizard through finding and constructively reporting relevant bugs in mozilla.org open source projects.

We typically find bugs by discovering the ways in which the Mozilla client software's actual behavior deviates from the expected behavior, as determined by specifications from the W3C, IETF, Netscape, and other such organizations.

We typically report bugs by researching and writing reproducible and specific bug reports in Bugzilla, the Mozilla bug tracking system.
 

Why Should I Get Involved?

To quote Eric S. Raymond, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

Opportunities to contribute abound for those who may not write software, but who wish to exercise the daily Mozilla builds and constructively report the bugs that they discover. Bugs reported by the rest of the world receive equal attention to the bugs submitted by Netscape employees.

By joining Mozilla QA, you can contribute to placing a fast, stable, and truly standards-compliant browser and mail/news reader onto the hard disks of tens of millions of Internet users, even without writing a single line of code.

How Can I Contribute?

Right now, you can contribute by rigorously exercising the daily builds, and reporting reproducible bugs in Bugzilla. Mozilla QA is gearing up to publish Netscape's internal browser test case suites onto mozilla.org, and to host a library of Netscape and Net Community test case suites.

Where Can I Learn More?

An increasing number of resources exist to help Mozilla QA volunteers. Here are the highlights:

Product Area QA Teams:

1. Browser/Composer Front End QA
   Led by Paul MacQuiddy, this team tests the browser's "front end". (The browser's "front end" presents the the user interface, excluding page layout and rendering.)
   
   
2. Browser Standards Compliance QA
   The team responsible for ensuring that the Mozilla browser vigorously supports web standards, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, DOM, XML, HTTP, and FTP. The Necko networking library and Gecko page layout and rendering engine fall within this team's domain. Gerardo Kvaternik leads this team.
   
   
3. Mail/News QA
   The team testing the Mozilla mail/news client, led by Lisa Chiang.
   
   
4. CCK QA
   The team testing the Client Customization Kit (CCK), led by Paul Wyskoczka. (CCK is a tool that creates custom-tailored versions of Netscape Navigator and Communicator.)
   
   
5. Installation QA
   The team testing the new SmartUpdate-based installer, also led by Paul Wyskoczka. (The new installer reduces the downloadable installer size to a mere 200 kilobytes!)
   
   
6. SmartUpdate QA
   The team testing Mozilla SmartUpdate technology, led (yet again!) by Paul Wyskoczka. (SmartUpdate enables software downloads and upgrades from within a Mozilla web browser.)
   
   
7. International QA
   The team responsible for ensuring support of international conventions such as character sets and date formats, as well as for ensuring that localized builds of the Mozilla client function properly. Led by Montserrat Sanz.

Reaching Other Mozilla QA Members:

1. Newsgroups
   In addition to the development newsgroups, several unmoderated QA newsgroups exist to foster communication between Mozilla QA members. These QA newsgroups can be a convenient resource to obtain feedback on your test specifications and cases, post results of your test runs, and locate individuals who may have a particular system configuration that you need to test against.
   
   To learn how to access and subscribe to these newsgroups, view the General Information and How to Subscribe sections of the mozilla.org Community page.
   
   
   • netscape.public.mozilla.qa.general
   • netscape.public.mozilla.qa.browser
   • netscape.public.mozilla.qa.editor
   • netscape.public.mozilla.qa.i18n
     
     
2. Net Community and Netscape Employee QA Contacts
   How to reach the QA leads of each component and product area.

Bug Writing Resources:

1. Bug Writing Guidelines
   How to write effective bug reports that lead to bug fixes.
   
   
2. Bug Template
   The bug template from the Bug Writing Guidelines.
   
   
3. Bugzilla Helper
   A user-friendly wizard for easily entering useful Mozilla bugs.
   
   
4. Most Frequent Bugs
   An up-to-date list of the most frequently reported bugs in the Seamonkey builds.
   
   
5. Bugzilla Code Definitions
   Meanings of the dozens of cryptic codes that appear in Bugzilla bug subjects. Many of these are being phased out in favor of Bugzilla keywords.
   
   
6. Performance Bugs
   How to write useful performance bugs that lead to a faster lizard.
   
   

Other Resources:

1. Netscape QA Internships
   Want to get paid to beat up the lizard for a summer?

(Thanks to Lisa Chiang and Christopher Pratt for contributing to this document. Additional suggestions welcome.)