We need your help in making Mozilla QA community a lot more open, engaging, and easier to start/continue to be involved - please give us valuable feedback!

Quality Assurance
#1

Hello, valued community!

Throughout the years, the Mozilla QA team(s) have undergone many changes (people, products, focuses, communication mediums, etc.,); as part of those changes, many of our wiki pages, blogs, websites, Twitter accounts and others have gone sadly out of date. Additionally, due to changes in what we work on, and how we work on it, some systems and processes are no longer open, or at the very least, as transparent as they could and should be.

Some specific examples of feedback we’d love to have you provide back to us are:

  1. Which site(s)/communication method(s), etc., (if any) are easy to use, understandable, and provide you with up-to-date information on how to get and stay involved in Mozilla’s QA/testing community?
  2. What can (and should) we do better, to make getting started/unstuck easier?
  3. Are you interested and able to help in fixing broken links, adding new ones, etc.?
  4. Are there any technological (tools, accounts, access-permissions, etc.) or process/communication barriers which we might be able to help you with, to unblock further contribution?
  5. What brought you into the Mozilla QA community? And, if you’re still active, what are the things which are keeping you there?

Anything else you can provide feedback/suggestions/direct help fixing (again, as specific as possible, down to the link/pages, etc.) would be fantastic!

The current team I’m on, Firefox Test Engineering (http://firefox-test-engineering.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) would also love it if you could give us specific feedback about the above Read the Docs page, and any links/instructions you find there, as well.

In posing these questions, I purposefully am trying not to lead any of the answers, but do note that I, at least, am particularly aware of, and will be focusing my and the larger team’s attention to bringing up-to-date/re-evaluating, the following (in no specific ranked order):

  1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/QA
  2. https://quality.mozilla.org/
  3. https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA

Thanks so much!

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#2

You’re right Stephen, a lot has changed recently and figuring out how to contribute isn’t as easy as it was before. QMO contains up to date info on Firefox test days, the information posted there is easy to understand, the etherpads are accessible and always contain clear instructions on how to get involved in the test day and what test cases to follow.

Keep the list of tasks that can be handled by community kept up to date. The fx-test dashboard is a great tool but unfortunately many of the tasks in it are outdated. This gives the impression that the fx-test team does not need any help/contributors to work on anything.

I would be glad to help with this task.

I live in an African country and one of the biggest barriers to my contribution is lack of a reliable Internet connection so because of this, I cannot attend team calls/meetings. When my connection is good, I usually download recorded meetings on air mozilla. I may be wrong about this one, but I don’t think the QA teams still record any of their calls on airmo so people like me who can’t dial in miss out on a lot of team communication.

I can’t think of any example of the top of my head right now, but many team docs aren’t as open/accessible as they were before. Some of these docs require LDAP credentials to view or special permission from the doc creator in the case of google docs. Can volunteers be given access to these?

I joined the QA community because there were clear instructions on how to contribute to each project and I genuinely felt that QA staff wanted to help me find something to do and mentor me. I still contribute to QA because I always get to learn something new and work on something that will benefit other people. I believe I still have a lot to learn in order to have a greater impact to the QA project as a whole so I will stick around until I do.

http://firefox-test-engineering.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ is well written and it has all the information a new contributor needs to get started. One question, the instructions are geared towards test engineers, not much is said about manual/exploratory testing. How do contributors who don’t know how to code(or can’t code well) contribute to Firefox Test Engineering?

Thank you for posting this question @stephendonner , I hope my comments are meaningful to your efforts of making it easier for community members to get continue their involvement in QA.

#3

If one visits www.mozilla.org, there is no information how to get involved (only in the footer how to contribute to that website itself). There was a form where people interested in contributing could choose the area they were interested in, but that got axed last May and now even the few static areas are gone. On the new contribute page, QA isn’t mentioned yet and no idea how people will find that page.

About the read the docs page:

  • To the uninformed reader, it’s not obvious that this is about coding.

  • The linked projects have no explanation.

  • It tells the reader to join #fx-test where one automatically gets greeted by a bot which instructs one to read the team page. In my humble opinion, that’s a distraction (if people get interested whom they are talking to, they still can look it up). What could be done/where help is needed would be more interesting.

  • “Find a mentor” expects the reader to ask for a mentor and wait for a reply, that slows them down. Easy tasks without mentors are a good start, the mentored one should be a second step.

Sometimes there is something on planet.

Training. It’s often much easier to fix something than to write a test for it, often because the test resources/framework is mostly undocumented.

1 Like