An open letter about Mozilla QA

mbrandt

2

Dear people of the web,

As some of you may already be aware, Mozilla has experienced a lot of change over the years. Most teams and projects within Mozilla have felt this change in some way, either directly or indirectly. The QA Team is no exception.

As a microcosm of the Mozilla Project, people involved in many disparate projects, QA has changed course many times. To many of you, these changes may have passed by unnoticed. Perhaps you noticed something was different about QA but were not able to understand how or why things had changed. Perhaps it was a feeling, that some of us seemed more distant, or that it just felt different.

This may come as a surprise to some, but there is no longer a single, unified QA team at Mozilla. After going through a few re-organizations, we are spread across the organization, embedded with — and reporting to — various product teams.

Those teams have benefited by having a dedicated QA person on staff full time. However, with so few of us to go around, many teams find themselves without any QA. In this state, we’ve lost the distinguished central QA organization that once was and in doing so we’ve lost a central QA voice.

As a result of these changes and a sense of perpetual reorganization we have reached a tipping point. We’ve lost some very talented and passionate people. Change within itself isn’t a bad thing. The loss of cohesion is. It is time to break this pattern, regain our cohesion and regain our focus on the community.

The core group of QA community members, paid and volunteer, will soon be getting together to formulate a mission statement. We’ll do this with a series of one-on-one conversations between core individuals who are interested in architecting a new QA community.  This will serve as the guiding light of our journey toward a more optimistic future together.

In recognition of those who might feel excluded from this process, we want to assure you that there will be opportunity to contribute very early on. Conducting these one on ones is just the  first step in a very long journey. We plan to bring everyone along who wants to be here, but this process requires great care and it will take time. If you’d like to help us build the future please get in touch with us.

Please read our wiki page to find out more about what we’re doing and where we’re going.

 

Sincerely,

Anthony Hughes and Matt Brandt

2 responses

  1. Asa Dotzler wrote on :

    Thank you, mbrandt and ashughes, for keeping the flame burning and for recognizing and sharing this challenge with the Mozilla community. QA is near and dear to my heart and I’m hopeful that we’ll come out of this era stronger than before. Good luck and let me know how I can help.

    1. Anthony wrote on :

      Thank you for your support Asa. It means a lot to us. As this process moves along we will be opening it up to more and more people for help. I’ll be sure to keep you in mind once we reach that stage. Cheers!