Automation Development report – week 39 2013

During the last week we did something phenomenal. As you might have heard, we were able to release Mozmill 2.0 to the world. After about 3 years of development it was one of our biggest milestones to finish off. But also lots of trouble with our Windows nodes in Mozmill-CI caused us a bit of headache, which we were able to finally get solved. For more details please read on…

Hightlights

As already announced by my blog post last week, we were able to finally release Mozmill 2.0. Since our team has taken over the work, we put a lot of additional efforts into the project. That said we really want to say a huge THANK YOU to all contributors, who helped us to finish off that work. You all are totally amazing! With the new version we will have a way more stable and feature-rich functional test framework available. Don’t miss to get it installed from pypi and try it out yourself. Keep in mind that it is fully backward compatible with Mozmill 1.5.x! So all of your existent tests will continue to work without modifications.

Beside that a lot of trouble came over us in terms of mozmill-ci breakage. As what I wrote in the last Automation Development report, we were facing a lot of issues with all of our Windows nodes. The high CPU load caused tests to run very slow and we even faced application disconnect issues with Firefox due to no response coming back to Mozmill. Henrik was heavily working on to get those issues fixed. The first step in disabling the Windows 8.1 nodes were already a good start, and we got more stable testruns. Now we are waiting for the VMs with the final version of Windows 8.1, which will hopefully be ready soon. But also disabling the Windows Defender helped a lot; we really don’t need that on our nodes for testing Firefox. So especially the suspicious installation and uninstallation duration for Firefox went down from about 4 minutes to only a couple of seconds. That’s the best time saver at all! Further we disabled the Windows Error Reporting, which came into the way because the huge amount of crashes we experienced lately. With that nothing halts the execution of our tests. A big thank you for the hint goes to Armen from the RelEng team!

Dave continued his work on Firefox OS and got some important new releases out for b2gperf 0.8, gaia-test 0.14 and gaia-test 0.15. Also you should have a look at this blog post for Building a harness for Eideticker… with LEGO which is kinda amazing. If you want to see it in real life and you are participating the Mozilla Summit in Brussels, check out his booth at the innovation fair.

Individual Updates

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