Well that went fast; what a wild quarter. The Mozilla train just keeps moving and seems to be ever accelerating. As we barrel down the track, it’s time for me to look back at my successes and failures missed opportunities of the last three months.
Desktop Firefox
Desktop Firefox saw several releases: Firefox 6, 7, and a few 3.6.* security releases; a couple of chemspills too. While that’s not all that different than the pace from earlier this year, this was the first time I was given the chance to lead. Early in the quarter I was signed on to become the QA Driver for Firefox 7. However, the Firefox 6 driver had to step out for a couple of weeks around the release. This presented me with the opportunity to jump into the driver seat 6 weeks ahead of schedule. As with past challenges, I tossed aside my fears, dove in head first, and managed to do my part to deliver a kick-ass product to millions of users.
Automation
This quarter I was given the opportunity to lead a small outsourced team of developers in Mozmill test development. With the creation of the QA Automation Services team, it was decided that Mozmill test development would remain a domain of Desktop Firefox. I was selected to lead this Mozmill test development project given I was heavily involved with the project from nearly the beginning. While we slipped on a couple of our goals we did make some great progress. We were able to automate 10 add-ons manager tests. With the help of the community, we were able to add 1 App Tab test as well. We also managed to add our first endurance test which tests Flash. All in all, I think it was a good quarter considering it was my first time as a development lead; with sufficient room for growth in the near-term.
Community
I was able to continue to grow the community through this quarter. We held 13 testdays (up 1 from last quarter and 2 from Q1). We saw an average attendance of 14, up 3 from the previous quarter. While some may call this growth marginal, I believe it is successful. In addition to this I was able to deliver on a couple of pet projects which I hope will increase visibility and understanding of who makes up the community. The first project was to create a singular document for planning, tracking, and archiving testdays and attendance, giving us the raw data needed to generate metrics (more on this in Q4). The second project was to create a survey to get feedback about testdays from those taking the first steps to contribute (more on this very soon).
What’s Next?
All in all I think Q3 was very successful. I’m looking forward to what Q4 and 2012 bring. I don’t have a concrete set of goals yet for Q4 but will by the end of the week. I’ll blog again once I have formulated my Q4 goals. To give you a sneak peak, I’d like to focus more on mentorship, visibility, and efficiency.
As always, thanks for reading.