Mozilla Quality Assurance
Who We Are and What We Do
Mozilla Quality Assurance (QA) is a network of countless volunteers from the Internet community and several mozilla.org employees. We share the common mission of taming the lizard through finding and constructively reporting relevant bugs in mozilla.org open source projects.
We typically find bugs by discovering the ways in which the Mozilla client software's actual behavior deviates from the expected behavior, normally determined by specifications from the W3C, IETF, and mozilla.org contributors.
We typically report bugs by researching and writing bug reports in Bugzilla, the Mozilla bug tracking system.
Why Should I Get Involved?
To quote Eric S. Raymond, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
Opportunities to contribute abound for those who may not write software, but who wish to exercise the daily Mozilla builds and constructively report the bugs that they discover.
By joining Mozilla QA, you can contribute to placing a fast, stable, and truly standards-compliant browser and mail/news reader onto the hard disks of tens of millions of Internet users, even without writing a single line of code.
Mozilla QA contributors around the world have also leveraged their Mozilla experience to obtain internships or full-time jobs in software quality assurance.
How Can I Get Involved?
Helping with QA is the definitive list of Mozilla QA opportunities and tutorials to teach you the ropes.
Where Can I Learn More?
An increasing number of resources exist to help Mozilla QA volunteers. Here are the highlights:
Product Area QA Teams:
- Browser/Composer Front End QA
This team tests the browser's "front end". (The browser's "front end" presents the user interface, excluding page layout and rendering.) - Browser Standards Compliance QA
The team responsible for ensuring that the Mozilla browser vigorously supports web standards, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, DOM, and XML. - Networking QA
The Networking library, which handles URLs, DNS, and network protocols like HTTP and FTP. - Mail/News QA
The team testing the Mozilla mail/news client. - Installation QA
The team testing the new XPInstall-based installer. - XPInstall QA
The team testing Mozilla XPInstall technology. (XPInstall enables software downloads and upgrades from within a Mozilla web browser.) - International QA
The team responsible for ensuring support of international conventions such as character sets and date formats, as well as for ensuring that localized builds of the Mozilla client function properly.
Newsgroups
The QA newsgroup exists to foster communication between Mozilla QA members. This newsgroup can be a convenient resource to obtain feedback on your test specifications and cases, post results of your test runs, and locate individuals who may have a particular system configuration that you need to test against.
To learn how to access and subscribe to these newsgroups, view the General Information and How to Subscribe sections of the mozilla.org Community page.
Bug Reporting Resources
- How to find previously reported bugs
- Bug
Writing Guidelines
How to write effective bug reports that lead to bug fixes. - Bugzilla
Bugzilla has a user-friendly wizard for easily entering useful Mozilla bugs. - Bugzilla Etiquette
- What to do and what not
to do in Bugzilla
Information explaining what should and what should not be done in Bugzilla when having the permission to confirm and/or edit bugs. - Most Frequently Reported Bugs
An up-to-date list of the most frequently reported bugs in the Seamonkey builds. - Bugzilla Keywords
Meanings of the dozens of cryptic codes that appear in Bugzilla. - Performance Bugs
How to write useful performance bugs that lead to a faster lizard.
(Thanks to Lisa Chiang and Christopher Pratt for contributing to this document. Additional suggestions welcome.)