Site Overlay

Firefox Automation report – Q1 2015

As you may have noticed I was not able to come up with status reports of the Firefox Automation team during the whole last quarter. I feel sad about it, but there was simply no time to keep up with those blog posts. Even now I’m not sure how often I will be able to blog. So maybe I will aim to do it at least once a quarter or if possible once a month.

You may ask how it comes? The answer is simple. Our team faced some changes and finally a massive loss of core members. Which means from the former 6 people only myself are remaining. Since end of February all 5 former team members from Softvision are no longer participating in any of the maintained projects. Thanks to all of them for the great help over all the last months and years! But every project we own is now on my own shoulders. And this is kinda hell of work with downsides like not being able to do as many reviews as I want for side projects. One positive thing at least was that I got pulled back into the A-Team at the same time. With that move I’m once more closer again to all the people who care about the basics of all test infrastructure at Mozilla. I feel back home.

So what have I done the whole last quarter… First, it was always the ongoing daily work for maintaining our Mozmill CI system. This was usually a job for a dedicated person all the last months. The amount of work can sometimes eat up a whole day. Especially if several regressions have been found or incompatible changes in Firefox have been landed. Seeing my deliverables for Q1 it was clear that we have to cut down the time to spent on those failures. As result we started to partially skip tests which were failing. There was no time to get any of those fixed. Happily the latest version of Mozmill is still working kinda nicely so no other work had to be dedicated for this project.

Most of my time during the last quarter I actually had to spent on Marionette, especially building up wrapper scripts for being able to use Marionette as test framework for Firefox Desktop. This was a kinda large change for us but totally important in terms of maintenance burden and sustainability. The code base of Mozmill is kinda outdated and features like Electrolysis (e10s) will totally break it. Given that a rewrite of the test framework is too cost-intensive the decision has been made to transition our Mozmill tests over to Marionette. Side-effect was that a lot of missing features had to be implemented in Marionette to bring it at a level as what Mozmill offers. Thanks for the amazing work goes to Andrew Halberstadt, David Burns, Jonathan Griffin, and especially Chris Manchester.

For the new UI driven tests for Firefox Desktop we created the firefox-ui-tests repository at Github. We decided on that name to make it clear to which product the tests belong to, and also to get rid of any relationship to the underling test framework name. This repository contains the harness extensions around Marionette, a separate puppeteer library for back-end and UI modules, and last but not least the tests themselves. As goal for Q1 we had to get the basics working including the full set of remote security tests, and most important the update tests. A lot of help on the security tests we got from Barbara Miller our intern from December to March. She did great amount of work here, and also assisted other community members in getting their code done. Finally we got all the security tests converted.

My own focus beside the harness pieces were the update tests. Given the complete refactoring of those Mozmill tests we were able to easily port them over to Marionette. We tried to keep the class structure as is, and only did enhancements where necessary. Here Bob Silverberg helped with two big chunks of work which I’m gladly thankful about! Thanks a lot! With all modules in-place I finally converted the update tests and got them running for each version of Firefox down to 38.0, which will be the next ESR release and kinda important to be tested with Marionette. For stability and ease of contribution we added support for Travis CI to our new repository. It helps us a lot with reviews of patches from community members, and they also can see immediately if changes they have done are working as expected.

The next big chunk of work will be to get those tests running in Mozmill CI (to be renamed) and the test reporting to use Treeherder. Also we want to get our update tests for Firefox releases executed by the RelEng system, to further reduce the amount of time for signoffs from QE. About this work I will talk more in my next blog post. So please stay tuned.

Meeting Details

If you are interested in further details and discussions you might also want to have a look at the meeting agendas, the video recordings, and notes from the Firefox Automation meetings. Please note that since end of February we no longer host a meeting due to the low attendance and other meetings like the A-team ones, where I have to report my status.

By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information

The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.

Close