Last week I presented a talk along with Marco Bonardo of the Firefox team at the Italian Free Software Conference in Ancona Italy. It was an interesting experience to give a joint Dev-QA talk and it really made me think more about all of the different ways we build quality into the products we release, from the automated tests that are run continuously all the way to the manual and exploratory testing that QA does to certify the release. There are a number of quality check points along the way that ensure that our users are getting a solid Firefox product when it is released.
While many of the talks were conducted in Italian there were some talks given in English, such as the wonderful keynote presentation that was given by our own Tristan Nitot as well as a presentation on Ganeti development: assuring software quality using open-source workflows by Iustin Pop of Google. Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli gave a talk on Sunday, and since he did have all of his slides in English that helped a bit in my understanding of his talk.
We also gave a B2G demonstration that was well received. Iacopo was able to build B2G on his phone, so we had two phones to demo. You could definitely see the enthusiasm in all of the faces of the participants while the demo was going on and we actually got some questions about how attendees could participate in the B2G project.
I also had the pleasure to meet Italian community member Marco Castelluccio, who lives in the same vicinity in Southern Italy as where my family originated from before they emigrated to the United States.
Overall it was a wonderful experience and I believe that Mozilla was very well represented at this event.
Some other takeaways:
- The Linux population was definitely well represented at this event.
- My MBP apparently required a bit more power than the hotel room could offer since I did blow a fuse in my room.
- It was a great experience to be at a conference outside of the U.S. and to spend time with our wonderful Italian community. The conference venue was also great – very comfortable with lots of good sized presentation rooms.
- flod is truly a great photographer and captured some great pictures of us speaking.