International Quality Assurance
by Katsuhiko Momoi
News: We are organizing Mozilla volunteers to participate in Mozilla China Top Site Testing Project. We need people who can read Chinese and also understand web technologies and standards. Read the project document (English, Simplified Chinese) for details.
What is International QA?
Mozilla has solid and extensive support for the display and input of many different languages around the world. Engineering and QA tasks to make Mozilla a truly usable browser and Internet application suite are many and we are always in need of help. International QA work is to test Mozilla for:
- Correct display of web pages under different encodings.
- Correct input into forms and other input fields under different encodings
- Font settings via Preferences Dialog are functioning correctly.
- Mail works OK for all the supported languages.
- The User Interface (UI) is appropriate for different languages
- The Mozilla application suite (Browser, Mail, Composer, Chatzilla, etc.) work as intended and expected for different language uses.
- etc.
If you find a problem that touches these areas, then you can help by filing an appropriate bug, asking questions, and informing fellow Mozilla users about such a problem.
How you can help:
There are many languages Mozilla supports. We have good testing resources around the world for Japanese and Western languages like French, German, and Spanish. Languages which can use testing help include: Chinese (Simplified, Traditional), Korean, Latin 2 (Czech, Polish, etc.), Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian, etc.), Baltic, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, etc.
Here are ways in which you can help:
- Pick a language or languages you are familiar with and test various areas of the product like Browser display, input, Mail, Composer, User Interface, etc. Initially you might use your own methods in identifying problems. But you might also refer to a concrete set of test cases as they become available.
- Published test cases:
- Try a daily smoketest suite published here. Try particularly, test sets 6, 7, and 8.
- Contribute a test case of your own. Write to International QA newsgroup or I18n engineering newsgroup.
- We are planning to publish a comprehensive international test suite soon. You can choose to run various test sets from the entire test cases that will be available. It will be published at the following location. Check the page from time to time for progress of the project:
- Test on various platforms/OSs localized into different languages.
What types of things can a volunteer help with?
- Identify, triage, verify bugs -- learn how to work with Bugzilla and contribute.
- Test different features or components
- Providing real language data for testing a feature or component
- Test for Localizability -- making sure that the client is easily localizable into most of the world's languages
- Identify User Interface related problems
- Test for the compliance of international standards
- Give feedback on existing test specifications and test cases
- Write/submit test specifications and test cases
- Or any other help which will make the Mozilla client a better product for international users.
You can begin participating in International Mozilla:
Below are some of the things you can try to get involved in making Mozilla better for different language users around the world.
- Test daily build with International Smoketests. Download a build to test.
- Get involved in Bugzilla and testing. Begin by reading
this page on Mozilla QA.
- Learn how to file for and look for bugs at Bugzilla. Get yourself a Bugzilla account.
- File bugs and provide additional information if needed.
- Read newsgroups like International QA newsgroup, I18n engineering newsgroup, L10n engineering newsgroup. Write articles, ask questions in these newsgroups. For more information on newsgroups and mailing lists, see this page.
- Learn about various international projects and specs (e.g. Character Coding menu specs):
- Read International Section of each milestone release notes.
Questions and Comments
- You can write to newsgroups like International QA newsgroup, I18n engineering newsgroup, L10n engineering newsgroup.
- Join IRC discussions at: irc.mozilla.org. Join the discussion group: #mozl10n