Ending QA community events, for now

mihai.boldan

2

Hello everyone,

We have an important announcement to make today, regarding the future of the Testday and Bugday community events we have been holding for our desktop product.

The state of things
QMO events have been around for several years now, with many loyal Mozilla contributors engaged in various types of manual testing activities– some centered around verification of bug fixes, others on trying out exciting new features or significant changes made to the browser’s core ones. The feedback we received through them, during the Nightly and Beta phases, helped us ship polished products with each iteration, and it’s something that we’re very grateful for.

We also feel that we could do more with the Testday and Bugday events. Their format has remained unchanged since we introduced them and the lack of a fresh new take on these events is now more noticeable than ever, as the overall interest in them has been dialing down for the past couple of years.

We think it’s time to take a step back, review things and think about new ways to engage the community going forward.

Goodbye, for now
Starting 2020, we are going to take some time to figure out what our next plans are. Test Days and Bugdays will be paused as a result, but we do plan to hold a final Testday this year, on December 20– we hope to see all of you there!

As we move forward, the #qa IRC channel will remain the best way to connect with us, so don’t hesitate to drop by and say hi. You’ll still be able to contribute towards bug fix verification by looking at bugs with the [good first verify] keyword.

Thank you all for your passion, loyalty and dedication to Firefox! As always, it’s inspiring to work with such amazing people!

2 responses

  1. Gabriela wrote on :

    Hello Mihal,

    I am very disappointed to read this, very disappointed indeed!

    I am very sorry but the decreasing interest in testdays is partly Softvision’s fault! Since you started organizing the activity, it was very difficult indeed to find someone to ask questions to via IRC! That way, in the past, learnt lots of super useful QA related things! Now this is impossible!

    Actually, I couldn’t join several testdays because I didn’t understand the prerequisites and there was no one available in #QA to answer my questions. Maybe it’s a timezone issue but, if so, the testday shouldn’t be so long. It should be as long as you can provide help via IRC!

    When I started joining this activity, 8 or 9 (or even more) years ago, they were organized by Mozilla’s QA Team. They were much shorter, but there was always someone available for answering questions in #QA!

    BTW, I cannot understand why you say the #qa IRC channel will remain the best way to connect with you, when you know it will be closed down in March 2020!

    1. mihai.boldan wrote on :

      Hi Gabriela. I’m sorry you feel this way. I think we’re in agreement that these events no longer work as well as they did, at least not in the current format.

      With respect to #qa being the best way to connect with QA– I stand by that. We haven’t yet figured out what the next communication channel will be, but we’ll let everyone know once we’ve found a suitable replacement.