For the past few weeks, I've been working on a project here for Mozilla QA to develop an extension to make it easy for people to get more involved in the testing community. Currently, thousands of you download nightly branch and trunk builds every day, but very few of these testers come in our Test Days, run testcases in Litmus, or participate actively in our QA Community. Firefox is a huge product, and no small team can test on the endless combinations of platforms, operating systems, locales, software, and hardware configurations used by millions of users. If a lot of community members each provide a small amount of effort, we can have good coverage across all the different configurations used by Firefox users and catch bugs early and often. Or, as Eric S. Raymond puts it, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.''
Major features of the extension include one-click access for nightly testers to run the tests in Litmus that need the most attention, and ways to notify testers when we need their help, such as before releases or when we hold special testing events. In short, the goal is to make it as easy as possible for moderately skilled users to get involved in testing Firefox and join the community.
In order to make this happen, we need your help. Many of the major features of this tool are in place, but we're looking a few good extension developers who are interested in volunteering to help make this a reality. I could especially use help with theming and styling of the user interface, security-related cleanup, and if you're really gung-ho, development around the user interface of the "come help us test" notification feature. So if you're a hot-shot extension developer interested in helping out with a project to improve Firefox's quality, drop me a note (a comment on this blog post is great, or ping 'zach' on irc.mozilla.org, or just email) and we'd love to have you on board.
Not an extension developer but want to help test Firefox? Head on over to QMO and come join us! :-)
Posted by zach at July 5, 2007 3:03 PM