From October 24-26 I participated in the Mozilla Festival in London. I was interested to attend the event for a few reasons, the first being I had never attended the event, and the second was to interact with the Mozilla Reps who would be at the event.
On the last day of the Festival, they distributed a fairly good quantity of FX OS Flame Reference Devices. I helped coordinate a team of Mozilla Reps and staff who flashed the devices to the latest build. The great end result of this was that we now have more community members who can flash devices and teach other members in their community how to flash devices.
As each participant came through the line, we did ask them how they planned to use the phone. Some of them were interested in developing, some wanted to dogfood the device, and some wanted to develop apps. Based on what they told us, we flashed the device accordingly. Next steps are that Asa and I will work to engage those individuals who received devices at the event that want to continue to be involved in testing and other activities.
On November 1-2 we held a Firefox OS Bug Squash Event in the London and Paris offices. As a QA team member I participated in the event in London and gave a short talk on Sunday about Firefox OS QA. Zac Campbell also talked a bit about the Gaia UI Automation tests (there had been some interest in covering that from several participants). I tried to make my presentation lightweight as I did not want to overwhelm them with lots of details. The most important point I stressed was how putting the right information in the bug can help our team (attaching an ADB logcat of the issue, screenshots, or videos if appropriate).
On Saturday morning the participants assembled in the Commons area and Francisco gave a short presentation. We then proceeded to help get their environments set up on their computer. There were at least a few people who had attended the Mozilla Festival and received a Flame device, and I helped them get their phones updated so they were running on the latest base image and a more recent version. There was even one contributor who attended who purchased a ZTE Open C just for the event – such dedication!
Once everyone was up and running, we pointed them to Bugs Ahoy to begin their work.
I was really impressed at how savvy some of the participants were. It wasn’t long before they were filing and fixing bugs! And then a bug-o-meter was created -:). I also tracked the bugs filed by participants by using a whiteboard tag. We also connected via Vidyo to the Paris office and we were at least able to see that group at work.
So overall even though it was primarily a Developer event, it was good to have a QA presence to guide the participants regarding bug filing and help troubleshoot when they were having issues with the devices. For the developers, there was some confusion around how you attach a patch and get it reviewed – that was a common question. I imagine
at future events we might want to spend a little time covering the basics of Bugzilla before the event begins.
Having workshops like this is a good first start – at each one we will learn what works well and what doesn’t. I thought this event was well received and the two day format allowed participants to continue working on what they started. And I believe this has set the tone for helping to have ongoing events like this in the Mozilla Spaces more regularly.