Automation Development report – week 35 2013

Our last week was again very productive, and a lot of smaller and larger tasks have been finished. We are getting closer to reach our quarterly goals. Our next big step is really to get the final version of Mozmill 2.0 out, and the Metro support finished. Then we can get started with implementing ui driven tests as requested by Mozilla QA.

Hightlights

With the combined work with our Softvision team and a couple of contributors we were able to release two versions of Mozmill in one go. See my blog post for release details of Mozmill 1.5.22 and 2.0rc5. Hopefully the 1.5.22 release will mark the end of life for the 1.5 branch, and that the 2.0rc5 was the last release candidate build for Mozmill 2.0. More to that topic soon.

To be able to move our Mozmill l10n tests from an older Mac Mini, which is currently running in the MV network, to the more stable and IT supported network in the SCL3 datacenter, we had to fix a couple of issues in mozdownload. So as result we have released mozdownload 1.9 last week. That fixed the last remaining blocker, and we will have the l10n tests running on staging soon.

Over the last couple of weeks we were monitoring the memory usage of Jenkins a lot. That happened not only in the browser but also more important for the whole system on the server side too. As we noticed the Java process has a really high heap memory usage. Beside that we had a couple of annoying issues around, which caused some of our testruns to early abort. So Henrik put a lot of work in getting Jenkins upgraded to the latest LTS (Long Term Support) version. Given that this was a big jump for our really outdated Jenkins version a lot of work had to be spent in testing everything. Also because nearly all of the Jenkins plugins, which we make use of, had updates available and had a slightly different format of the XML configuration, all our static files had to be updated too. But by early last week we were able to push those bits to our staging server, and running that version of Jenkins for a week, hasn’t brought up any kind of regression. That’s great! To finish up the work, Henrik published all bits and bytes to our production machine yesterday. We will continue observing the memory usage, and let you know if the situation got better.

Beside that we made a couple of changes to our list of available nodes for the mozmill-ci cluster. As of last week we brought our Windows 8.1 nodes (3x 32bit, 3x 64bit) online for preliminary testing. Given that all went well and no further issues have been seen, they are now fully integrated into jobs triggered by Pulse notifications. Further we have replaced our existent Ubuntu 12.10 nodes with the current release of Ubuntu 13.04. That means we run our tests on Ubuntu 12.04 (LTS) and Ubuntu 13.04 for both 32bit and 64bit now.

As requested by Mozilla QA we have to run more tests for localized beta and release candidate builds of Firefox. That will help us to finally stop releasing broken l10n builds like Firefox 24.0b1 to our users. For all locales covered by our tests, we do now check for start-up failures like the XML parsing error for the main window. So Henrik pushed a patch to production, which enabled tests to be run for the first 10 most used locales of Firefox.

Individual Updates

For more granular updates of each individual team member please visit our weekly team etherpad.