Greetings fellow testers! Welcome to another edition of the About:Quality Newsletter. There’s been a lot of activity recently so let’s get into it!
Desktop Firefox
After much testing, and some weekends worked, we were able to ship Firefox 8.0.1 and Firefox 9.0b2. This was a concerted effort by many testers. Thanks everyone who helped! This week we are working on Firefox 9.0b3. If you want to help test, get in contact with ashughes on irc.mozilla.org in the #qa channel, or check out our test plan.
Mobile Firefox
The mobile Firefox team has been working hard to develop a native UI for Android (ie. no more XUL). The goal is to create an experience which is a lot snappier. Last week we held a testday to test help find issues with these new builds. If you missed this opportunity, don’t worry, there will be more opportunity to test the new UI in the coming weeks. It should be coming to a nightly soon.
In addition, Mozilla is launching a new program called Mobile Test Drivers. The goal of this program is to increase Nightly usage and to gather valuable bug reports. We need everyone from all backgrounds to get involved and put in the extra effort to test the new Fennec builds on Android phones. If you want to get involved in this project, please begin by filling out this short survey.
MozCamp Asia
Tony Chung visited Asia last week to attend the MozCamp Asia event. It was two full days 2 packed with interactive presentations, discussions on new products, engagement opportunities, and community building. Tony gave a presentation about internet testing strategies to an audience of South-east Asian contributors.
MozCamp Europe
Also last week was the MozCamp in Berlin. We had a few people in attendance, including Marcia Knous, Raymond Etornam, and Henrik Skupin.We met with many community members, including some from Ghana, Mali, South Africa, and Senegal. Most of the people we talked to were interested in localization or web development and seemed very impressed when they learned what QA at Mozilla does for the project.
Documentation was cited as a reason why people found it difficult to contribute; mostly because it was difficult to find enough information about a project. This is something we are constantly working to improve. If you have any feedback you wish to share, you should get in touch with us directly through one of the team pages.
Community
As mentioned earlier, the native Android UI testday last week was a great success. If you are looking for ways to get involved this week, we will be having a testday for some of the new Developer Tools landing in Firefox Aurora. We are also working on testdays in the near future for Open Web Apps, Socorro (our crashstats dashboard), and Firefox Performance.
Speaking of testdays, last week we launched our new documentation. The purpose is to explain what testdays are about and act as a reference for people who want to organize their own testdays. This documentation has lived for months on our wiki but it felt like it was time to move this to QMO, the home of our community.
On a final note, the QA Community team got together last week to brainstorm ideas for the direction we want to take in 2012. You can check out the notes of that brainstorming session here. This will give you an idea of our thoughts about 2011 and our vision for 2012.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Thanks to everyone who helped test or attended one of our events. There is much more to come.