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What we’ve done so far over the past 3 months:
- 2,636 manual test cases run via litmus
- 150 Bugs created spanning multiple Mozilla related projects
- 8 MozMill Testscripts created
- 15 Website Test Reports collected
- An average of 39.3 Testday participants on IRC partaking in the day’s activities

I’m pretty proud of the work that’s been done so far by the Mozilla QA Community since we re-started Testdays on a bi-monthly basis. That’s a lot of results over a time when we were still trying to figure out how to use Testdays in the best way possible and squeeze the amount of participation with what we had at the time.

Of course, it’s still in its infancy as a lot of infrastructure is still in need of being built up ( i.e. standard test guides, indexing participants and their contributions over individual as well as multiple Testdays, QMO work, creating a persistent Testday personality, etc. ) as well as finding a way to spread the word to people who really do need these events to hone their skills and/or learn new ones ( i.e. currently discouraged workers, students [high school and college], those who are just interested in web QA work, those interested in the advocation of the quality of the internet’s content, etc. ). A lot of it is already in the process of being done, so expect us to get a lot better and a lot more efficient in the coming months as we continue to drive this to wherever it may go.

With all of that said, what would you like to see out of Testdays that you haven’t seen already? I’d love to hear anything, especially comments and concerns, about what the Mozilla Community has seen so far and would like/like not to see again!

I recently attended the wedding of a family friend in which a number of conversations about Firefox-love-and-destroy-IE-completely came up. Now, at first I didn’t pay any attention to it as I thought it was just a form of congratulations on the new job, but looking back on it, the responses were more than that. A number of these people, many of whom I had seen only once or twice in my lifetime, raved on and on about it. The it they were talking about wasn’t the browser; it was the switch they had made. They were given the opportunity to choose their browser and make it better if they so wanted.

Now, this concept has been beaten half to death within the Mozilla community as well as those in the know about open source projects, but I don’t think the movement has fully scratched the surface of its potential to the rest of the world. You see, those wedding attendees weren’t just talking about a simple switch of their primary web browser. It was the fact that someone had built a system to give them the opportunity to make a change against a very inhumane state of affairs. They, nay, We wanted to be shown that something could be done to change the status quo…and it was. So, a little over 10 years later, where does it go from here? I have no idea, but I’d like to think that this is just the starting point.

There’s been a lot of new questions I’ve had to ask myself when its come to thinking of a way to change the workflow for the Mozilla QA team’s web portal, QMO. Namely, am I really doing this correctly? I mean this is the first time I’ve had to do anything of the sort, especially creating mock ups and work-flow diagrams.

With that said, it’s been incredibly fun and its something I really enjoy doing, but that in no way means that I’m any good at it… and that’s scary. Not because a lot of people are going to be seeing the results of this project, but because I care about the ideals of the company and want its culture and ways of doing things to be spread throughout the rest of the world. Unfortunately, to truly believe in that means to truly want the best results to be put out there. And to have the best results come out of this project means to have the most experienced and most creative people/team working on it. From that line of logic, well, we don’t want to mess this up by out-workflowing the workflow. Making the darn thing too simple might backfire and either force the user to think that there isn’t enough stuff that goes around here or get lost after starting their experience with MozQA.

Here, take the Get Involved Section for example:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Community/QMO_Discoverability/Get_Involved

It’s meant as a simple, easy-to-understand workflow that gets the user to be a part of the MozQA Community, but will it be obvious to the user? Is there too much information on the Get Involved page? Do I need a foxkeh or two? Now, multiply this over a couple sets of audiences and this smorgasbord of UX complexity just shouts its prominence from the rooftops.

Oh well, at least I’ll know how to use it.

A month into my new job at Mozilla and it’s pretty much everything I expected to be and a lot more. It does sounds rather cliche, but it’s true. Coming into it, I expected a hectic pace, incredibly bright and passionate people and a fun environment. After a few weeks of working in-house with everyone there, all those things turned out to be very true. Yet, they don’t explain the uniqueness of the company completely.

At first, I thought of it as like working in a think tank because ideas and the talk of new ideas was very free-form and open. But, that’s not completely analogous as think tanks extend their ideas via advocating policies, rules, laws, etc. Mozilla is more about empowerment through creating a platform to implement ideas that are created within their community. So, it’s incredibly unique to any other organization in the world as it’s capable and deeply motivated in creating and maintaining commitment to make the web, and the world indirectly, a better place.

Now, most people that are pretty knowledgeable about the company and it’s history already understand that, but it’s not until you see everyone here working on a day-to-day basis that you get a full appreciation for that culture. The ground-work done to create this communal-based practice of empowerment is something that is felt throughout the organization and it’s community of volunteers no matter how much experience, education or standing you have. To me, it’s the reason why the people at Mozilla are so passionate and unique. Mostly everyone understands it, at least, in a subconscious level and want this way of doing projects to spread. This entire experience just makes me a lot more excited about the world and I’m glad I’ve gotten a chance to take part in it.