This past year on the Mozilla Web Team, 2011, was an incredibly
fortuitous and ambitious adventure that finished off with excellent
fireworks. I’m currently a QA lead on 4 projects but two of them
accomplished something special in the final days of the year. Not too
long ago Mozilla launched BrowserID; a secure, single sign on service
that doesn’t have the privacy concerns associated with similar services
(Google, Facebook, etc). A year-end goal was to integrate BrowserID into
two of our web properties without floundering on quality. I’m happy to
write that both affiliates.mozilla.org (currently /en-US/ only) and
mozillians.org landed BrowserID. The teams on both projects worked
really hard to make this happen during an already full time of the year.
From the QA front this would not have been possible without help from
the broader Mozilla community. A large portion of our user base
actively dove into the mud of Bugzilla and filed bugs. In addition to
receiving feedback from our users a particular individual introduced
himself and offered to help out. I wanted to give a special thank you to
Rajeev Bharshetty [:rshetty] for spending a significant amount of
time during his winter holiday from school. He did a truly staggering
amount of exploratory and release testing. The level of quality of both
releases and the teams understanding of the underlying risks was greatly
effected by him.
I look forward to 2012 and seeing what types of testing mischief we can get
into. The Mozilla QA community is going to get rocked to its core this
year. There are some very curious ideas in the pipeline. This next
year we’ll see broader exploration into enabling community collaboration
and engagement mechanisms on our projects. Individuals like Rajeev will
no doubt help define the future test strategies. If you find yourself
reading this post and would like to get involved on an open source
project, pop into our irc channel at irc.mozilla.org#mozwebqa and
say hello. We’re a friendly lot of mostly non-grumpy testers 🙂
- [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-browserid-and-how-does-it-work
- [2] http://identity.mozilla.com/post/7616727542/introducing-browserid-a-better-way-to-sign-in
- [3] https://mozillians.org/
- [4] https://affiliates.mozilla.org/
- [5] http://www.openprobe.blogspot.com/2012/01/exploring-things.html