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Mozilla Messenger (Mail/News) Quality Assurance - You Can Make a Difference!

by Lisa Chiang
last modified 2000-10-23

There's no such thing as "too much testing!"

In the spirit of open source development, the folks responsible for the quality of the commercial Mozilla product are bringing the Net community into every stage of the development process, including Quality Assurance (QA) and are currently identifying people who would like to help out. This help can come in many different forms:

  • Testing with different hardware configurations
  • Testing with different mail servers (including different configurations and load levels)
  • Testing with a wide spectrum of real-world data files
  • Testing composition and display of HTML/rich text messages
  • Testing interoperability with different mail readers
  • Identifying usability problems
  • Identifying parity issues where features may be missing or inconsistent across platforms
  • Giving feedback on existing test specifications and test cases
  • Writing test specifications and test cases
  • Executing test specifications and test cases
  • Identifying bugs, writing bugs, and verifying bugs
  • Or really, help in any form at all from people who have extra time and want to help make a better product!

If you'd like to help out and do some ad-hoc testing:

  • Just start downloading the nightly builds and start setting up for mail to use. (More info on this forthcoming.)
  • Be sure to take a look at the Getting Started page to get yourself situated to Mozilla Mail/News QA!

Thanks for your interest! Be sure to take a look at the Getting Started page to get yourself situated to Mozilla Mail/News QA!

Developed a new feature? If you've come to this page from the Mozilla Mail/News Job List page, then you're probably a developer who wants to write some new features for Mozilla and wants to find out how to get your feature tested by the Mozilla community. Here are some suggestions:

  • Write a document on how your feature will work and what its limitations will be. Anyone reading your "spec" should be able to visualize and understand how your feature works so that good test cases can be developed for it.
  • With this document available, you can post to any of the QA newsgroups in order to find someone who will be able to test your feature.
  • If there is no volunteer, you may want to write your own test plan and test cases for your feature. Be sure to include any test harness that you may have created.

Thanks to Stacey Curtis for her feedback drafting this document.