Wrapping Up an Internship at Mozilla

Friday is approaching fast, it will be my last official day as an intern with Mozilla Corporation, but certainly not my last day with the project and overall initiative.

The past four month’s have offered me an an incredible chance to learn, far more than any one job, classroom or book may offer. I have learned a lot; everything from the Mozilla platform to invalidation reference testing to XML User Interface Language (XUL) to reducing test-cases for crashes in the browser to even the vast assortment of brown-bag and meet-up discussions, I have learned a lot. With the knowledge gained, this internship opportunity has been far more rewarding than one could possibly imagine. There is nothing more rewarding than having the opportunity to discover and ascertain and to certainly ask many upon many questions.

Four month’s long, I worked alongside the QA (Execution & Test Dev), (that of which include Clint and Heather) team driving forth many efforts within the world of testing. Over the months, I got to tackle quite a few tricky issues that turned out to require new and unique solutions that I really enjoyed inventing and implementing. The different challenges and testing opportunities were each rewarding as they demonstrated the underlying importance of software testing.

See my parting presentation here for a complete overview (no <iframe/> in WordPress) of the major project I worked on in July/August and the test development areas I worked on in May and June .

That being said, I’m not gone yet. Despite a return to my final year of software development in school, I’ll continue to chip in to the efforts of the QA team and other projects to come, only I’ll be on IRC at a slightly different time of day.

Thanks Mozilla and in particular the friendly folks of QA for the first-rate experience!

Take care Mozilla,

Aaron

Totally hip, totally rad Mozilla QA Companion 1.0

Mozilla QA Companion 1.0 Released

Fresh new QA Companion. This version has a revamped design of the former QAC, with functionality for running manual tests, reporting bugs, and viewing the latest QMO news. 1.0 is a vast improvement over 0.2.3!

Download the latest version here

So what is the Mozilla QA Companion (QAC)?

The Mozilla QA Companion (QAC) is a new tool that was created after discussions between the QA team and community about how to make it easier for anyone to get involved with the Mozilla project and help us test Firefox.

The QAC is meant to be an easy way to get community members involved in the QA process. It pulls testcases from Litmus and provides a response form, all within the QAC interface. The QAC also includes notifications for important QA events such as Bug Days, and keeps users up-to-date with live feeds from the QMO site and forums.

Features

• General QMO tab — updates on news, forums, etc.
• ‘Run Tests’ tab — This is the heart of the extension. It allows users to get testcases to run and to submit results from within the extension. QAC will detect most system settings and helps new users set up a Litmus account if they don’t have one already.
• ‘File Bug’ tab – File bugs by submitting a report!
• Settings/Help (Preferences) — This is for the confused or misconfigured.

Installation

You can install the QA Companion like any other Firefox add-on by visiting https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5428

Getting involved with testing and development

• Install Mozilla QA Companion 1.0
• Run test cases through QAC by interacting with Litmus
• Submit bug reports to Bugzilla through issues you find in testcases.
• Join us in #qa on irc.mozilla.org

The interface is fairly intuitive and easy to follow, but please let us know if you have any questions. Find us on IRC or post to the QMO forums. We hope you find the Mozilla QA Companion a useful tool that helps you get more involved with the Mozilla QA community!

Thanks!

- Aaron Train, on behalf of the Mozilla QA Companion revamp team

The Beauty of the Community

It was only about 12 days ago that we released Firefox 3.5 and unveiled one of the new core features; support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. Less than 12 days later, community members have created basic full screen support for the video element; an enhancement feature in design phase on Bugzilla!

That’s incredible!

Full Screen Video, is the name of the add-on, and it adds a Full Screen option to the context menu for HTML5 videos.

Cheers, ‘design-noir’

Aaron