Zach's Blog

Zach is back!

Tuesday was my first day back at the Mozilla Corporation for Summer 2007. It's wonderful to be back for my third summer working full-time out of the office and to dive back into the thick of things. Mitchell mentioned yesterday that Mozilla has been moving so fast lately, and coming back after a school year where my involvement in the Project was fairly limited, I can certainly agree. In the past six months since the Summit, there are so many new faces and so many new projects and things going on. Everyone's rearranged, either to Building S or to new cubes in K. I'm fortunate enough to have Asa's old desk, which brings me oddly full circle in a way: Asa was the first person to help me out on IRC and granted me my canconfirm and editall privileges when I first got involved with the project.

This summer, I'll be working again with the QA Team. Much of my work will continue to involve Litmus, our testcase management system. I'm working on user permission groups and account settings now (including a much needed forgotten password reminder), and there's lots more to do with Litmus after that, so keep those bug reports coming.

I also hope to spend some more time on the QA Extension project. At the end of last summer, I started on a Firefox extension to make it easier for new testers to help out with QA. The basic idea is a friendly wizard that helps users get set up with a Litmus account and serves up testcases in a little floating window. Eventually, the QA team would be able to send out notifications of upcoming testdays or pre-release testing events through the extension, or to push particular groups of testcases when extra testing is needed around a certain area (i.e. if major changes are made to, say, Search, we could ask users to run a few Search testcases). This is all mostly a Big Idea at this point, but I plan to work on finishing a prototype and taking this further. If anyone has any ideas or is interested in this project, I'd certainly be interested in hearing from you.

It's great to be back. If I haven't seen or met you yet, hello, and I'll be seeing you all around Mozillaland.