Mozilla Project SQA Approach
Last Month (April 8th), Tim Riley, spoke about SQA approach on the Mozilla project at Silicon Valley Software Quality Association. Tim is my mentor, guru, and ex manager who hired me into Sun.
Tim Riley is Director of Quality Assurance at Mozilla Corporation. Tim
leads a team of 20,000 nightly testers (!), 1600 identified QA volunteers (!), 400 developers writing unit test cases (!), and the 17
members of Mozilla's SQA team. Before joining Mozilla, Tim managed
teams testing high security operating systems and J2SE JRE/JDK at Sun
Microsystems, as well as other test teams.
The highlights of the talk includes:
- What it takes to test Firefox, Thunderbird, etc
- Interesting very popular open source project testing challenges
- Pre integration testing requirements
- Importance of code reviews (yes, they are still important)
- Important software engineering tools like tinderbox, bugzilla, etc.,
- Very interest test automation tools like buildbot, mochitest, reftest, xpcshell, etc
Tim is a great speaker and very passionate on software quality subject. The slides will be posted here. Certainly, Mozilla is a pioneering example of how to create and maintain a great quality community around an open source project. It was a good inspiration for us to start GlassFish Quality Community for our popular open source GlassFish project at Sun. We will share GlassFish Quality Community later.
