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Helping with QA

Maintained by Marcia

There are many things you can do to help out with the Mozilla project in the QA department, and all of them don't require being able to code. A few of them don't even require knowing any HTML or other web technologies. Here's an overview of the different ways you can help.

Work in Bugzilla

Confirm unconfirmed bugs - new bugs submitted are marked UNCONFIRMED by default - we need to confirm that they exist before they are passed to developers.
Triage Browser-General bugs - bugs which have no home end up in the Browser-General component. They need to be sent to the right place.
What to do and what not to do in Bugzilla - information explaining what should and what should not be done in bugzilla.mozilla.org when having the permission to confirm and/or edit bugs.
Write test cases for layout bugs - Decomposing layout bugs into test cases is very helpful to engineers - it saves them loads of time.
Have a look at the qawanted bugs to see if you can help with any of them.
Join Bug Day, every Tuesday on irc://irc.mozilla.org/qa, There are three different times depending on where you live in the word: East Asia/Australia session: 8pm-10pm in Tokyo, Japan gmt+9, Europe/Africa session: 8pm-10pm in Paris, France gmt+1, Americas session: 9pm-11pm in N.Y., NY. gmt-5, 6pm-8pm in San Francisco, CA. gmt-8 - a great way to get involved.

Nightly Builds

Smoketest Builds using Litmus - Every day, development stops while we test a build for regressions and problems. This is very important. Mac testers are particularly welcome.
Run Tests - Many tests have been written for Mozilla. This page lists some of them.
Test SSL - SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is used for secure websites.

Slightly Harder Stuff...

Improve Performance - a general guide to doing performance testing and improvements. You need to be fairly techie for this.
Help us write test cases for Litmus

Resources for the Test Community

Help us test
Litmus Test Tool - Open 24/7 for your enjoyment
Install the Mozilla QA Companion
Visit Our Mozilla QA Portal Site
- Mozilla Quality Assurance Site
IRC Channels
- #qa IRC channel on irc://irc.mozilla.org/ - where general QA stuff happens as well as the home for Bug Day
- #mozillazine IRC channel on irc://irc.mozilla.org/
- #smoketest IRC channel on irc://irc.mozilla.org/ - daily build testing
Newsgroups
- mozilla.dev.quality

QA Howto Guides

Tools for Testers

Custom Keywords: The coolest undocumented feature in Mozilla. These are amazingly useful.
Bugzilla: for reporting bugs. Make sure you include all the information Mozilla developers need to understand your bug.
Simple Bugzilla Search: a simplified Bugzilla query tool.
How To use Dependency Walker: A basic document that explains how to use depends.exe (useful for answering the question: why did mozilla fail to load?)
QuickPhrase, a Win32 tool for inserting text from a hotkey - good for bug triaging.