That means we have the following correlations now:

default => Firefox 3.7
mozilla1.9.2 => Firefox 3.6.x
mozilla1.9.1 => Firefox 3.5.x

More details about branch handling for our Mozmill tests can be found on MDC.

The Mozmill test repository is available under the following two locations:

http://hg.mozilla.org/qa/mozmill-tests/
http://github.com/whimboo/mozmill-tests

A list of fixes, which have been made it into this release, can be found on Bugzilla. Lets give an explanation for some of those:

• Bug 542000: With former Mozmill releases there were needs to install the Python for Windows extensions (pywin32). If you have used the MozillaBuild environment, changes to the registry were needed. All that work hasn’t to be done from now on. Installing MozillaBuild is enough to prepare the system for Mozmill. A big thanks goes to Atul Varma who removed that dependency and made our life more compelling.
• Bug 543501: One of our upcoming projects is the execution of Mozmill tests against add-ons. Therefore we have to make sure that the usage of Mozmill will be as easy as possible. That’s why the misleading –plugin command line option has been changed to –addons. Make sure to use this option from now on.
• Bug 548446: Mozmill had problems with installing some of the existing extensions because it was not able to find the extension id. Thanks goes to Jonathan!
• Bug 544896: If you have long test-runs it was possible that the software update dialog came up and removed the focus from the window currently under test. That’s why the automatic update for the application has been disabled. If you want to run tests against that feature make sure to enable the preference app.update.enabled before.
• Bug 558404 and Bug 559152: Some controller functions have been updated which missed some details about failures. Now we always have a stacktrace with full information available.

The new version of the add-on can be found on addons.mozilla.org. It’s under review right now but can already be installed. For all the others who are using the command line client of Mozmill, you can simply run the “easy_install -U mozmill” command to update to the new 1.4.1 release.

If you have questions don’t hesitate to send your feedback to the mozmill-dev mailing list or directly contact us on IRC in the #qa channel.

About 2 weeks ago I got my new Nokia N900 device for testing purposes. During the next couple of months I will have to run some dogfooding against the mobile Firefox aka. Fennec. To have it handy all the time I will have to use it as my mobile phone. Therefore it’s necessary to synchronize all the relevant information, e.g. Contacts, Calendars, and Tasks, between OS X and the N900.

There is no official plug-in yet which will allow the synchronization with iSync. But after a quick check I have found a plug-in which is still in a beta state but works quiet well for all of my data, and that in both directions. You can download the software from this website. The installation is fast and you will be able to start the first sync process nearly immediately.

But lets talk in-detail about the progress…

During the last All Hands week in December 2009 I had to hold a presentation in one of our QA group meetings about the current state of the Mozmill tests and about the software update tests. Everyone was excited to see the improvements especially for the update tests which do not need any cumbersome file edits anymore. Finally we had an interesting discussion and collected some ideas about how to run those Mozmill tests in the future. As result we decided to setup a machine in the QA lab which will run Mozmill tests once a day against nightly builds of Namoroka and Shiretoko on OS X, Linux, and Windows. Further we wanted to use it as our machine to run Mozmill tests against release candidates and to verify the update channels. No sooner said than done…

Directly after the Christmas holidays my colleague Al ordered a Mac Mini and did the initial setup routine. He handed me over a system with 3 partitions. One for OS X 10.5, another one for OS X 10.6, and a third partition which is used for all the virtual machines and other necessary data. While talking about virtual machines the following will be in use: Ubuntu 9.10, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

My first task was to setup the initial Mozmill environment for all those operating systems. There is a nice documentation up on MDC which helps to make the task as easy as possible. To be able to share builds, scripts, and other stuff between the vms each of those has the shared folders feature enabled and a virtual drive connected to the data partition.

For the daily test-runs against en-US nightly builds of Firefox 3.6.x (Namoroka) and Firefox 3.5.x (Shiretoko), we decided to have OS X 10.5, Ubuntu 9.10, and Windows XP always open. With the help of the crontab on Linux and OS X, and the scheduled tasks on Windows we are able to start the tests at the same time each day. Given by the availability of the update snippets we have chosen 8am PDT for now. I’m not sure if that will work every day due to some slightly time shifts but it’s still something we have to improve. To run all the available tests I have written a wrapper script in Python which runs each of the different tests sequentially. This script will be used from any of the above mentioned vms. The order how the tests are run is given by:

• Software Update tests: With the software update tests we check that nightly updates can be downloaded and applied via the software update dialog. Also we make sure to run the successive Mozmill tests against the most recent nightly build.
• Normal tests: Those tests cover most of our implemented tests for the Smoketests, BFT, and FFT test group which do not require a restart of the browser.
• Restart tests: The restart tests cover the remaining tests and are able to even test complex paths which require a restart of the browser.

Now someone may ask how do we track the results. There is no-one sitting on that machine. That’s correct. Therefor we use the rich feature set of Mozmill 1.4 which is able to send the results as a JSON object to any CouchDB server. For our usage inside QA such a server has been setup a while ago and is also used by our Mozmill tests now. It’s publicly accessible which means that everyone can check and analyze our daily results. If you are interested check-out the summary page on brasstacks. Click on any of the entries to see all the details of each test-run. For the moment the web interface is really simple and hackish but it gives us the chance to easily track failed tests.

Within the next weeks or months a couple of improvements have to be made on the client side but also for the web interface. In general it covers:

• Finalize the decision which application information has to be acquired by Mozmill and has to be send to brasstacks.
• Make Mozmill more robust against failures. The biggest problem we have are modal dialogs which can cause a hang of the complete test-run.
• The software update tests have to be fixed to send results for each test module. Actually only for the first module results are available.
• Complete new design views are needed to give an easy and structured access to all of the existent results. That is probably the biggest chunk. A separate blog post will follow once we start to work on that item.

Even with those tasks in the queue we are ready to run daily Mozmill tests continuously each day and use the same machine for our release testing work.

As usual we do not rest, so expect more to hear about Mozmill testing in the near future.

The patch on Bug 533227 adds report support for restart tests which can push results to a couchdb instance now. With Mozmill 1.3 only normal Mozmill tests had that capability.

Further we have improved the handling of Python callbacks from within Mozmill tests. While the former version of Mozmill has only supported those callbacks for restart tests, you can use them in normal tests (Bug 538058) now. The only restriction is that the test-run has to be started from the command line client. Users with only the extension installed will not have access to this feature. In the future we will probably use it to implement handling of system level elements and events. Ongoing work can be checked on Bug 525060.

Another great enhancement we are proud to announce are the simplified steps to install Mozmill as command line client on Windows. The only requirement we have is the Mozilla Build environment. There is no need to install Python or the pywin32 extension in parallel anymore. Complete instructions can be found on MDC. A big thanks goes to Atul Varma for his contribution. You helped us a lot!

For more information check-out the complete list of fixes.

Mozmill 1.4 is still in the review queue on addons.mozilla.org. It will take a bit until it is officially available there. So for now grab a copy from Mikeal’s repository and give it a try.

• With the Lightweight Themes support users will be able to skin their browser chrome without having to install Personas. Browse through the list of the most popular Personas and hover the different themes to see a preview directly pinned onto your browser. A click on “Wear It” will finally choose the skin.
• The new outdated plug-in protection checks the installed plug-ins on your system and will warn you when a newer and safer version is available.
• Enjoy full-screen playback for HTML5 video elements.
• Improved start-up times, better responsiveness and faster Javascript execution which were a main focus for 3.6.
• Support for new CSS attributes like gradients, background sizing, and pointer events.
• Support for new DOM and HTML5 specifications including the Drag & Drop API and the File API.
• Firefox 3.6 blocks unknown and vulnerable libraries to lower the risk of crashes. In the past a couple of 3rd party tools have been circumvent the official way in installing add-ons which lead to a significant number of crashes after an upgrade of Firefox.
• Full list of features.

With a release cycle of only 7 months Mozilla has been shown that it’s possible to release a new major version of the Firefox browser in such a short interval. And that’s absolutely necessary when comparing Firefox with products of other browser vendors. Bringing the newest technology as fast as possible to our users will full-fill their needs and finally help the continuously increment of market share.

But all that work wouldn’t have been possible without the help of the overwhelming community around Firefox. Thousands of contributors spent hours of their spare time in developing, localizing and testing Firefox. We can always repeat: Thank you soo much!!

For myself it was the second Firefox release I have worked on as an employee of the Mozilla Corporation and each week has been shown that it is a pleasure to work with all those amazing people around the world. I’m feeling great to be able to spend all my time fully devoted to Firefox. It was a great experience and a path of learning new technology, improving social interactions, and making the web better.

Given Firefox 3.6 I was able to work on projects like:

• DLL blocklisting / Components folder lockdown: 3rd party applications which install their own modules inside the components folder of Firefox or LSP’s (Layered Service Provider) which get bind to the Firefox process can crash Firefox. With DLL blocklisting those crashing or malicious modules will be blacklisted and not loaded anymore. On the other hand only known XPCOM modules will be loaded thanks to the components folder lockdown feature. Both features have been tested with various top100 3rd party applications.
• Tab Network Prioritization: Restoring a Firefox session with a dozen of open tabs in one or multiple windows slows down the restoration process more or less. Until now there was no specification in which order those tabs get loaded. Means tabs outside of the visible tabbar or in underlying windows were restored in parallel. As result you had to wait longer until the currently selected tab has been finished loading. From now on the current tab has the highest priority, followed by visible tabs in the same window and tabs in underlying windows. As tests have been shown this feature works very well in Firefox 3.6. More improvements will come with the next version.
• Crashkill: To lower the number of crashes for Firefox the Crashkill project has been initiated a while back. In the last quarter I was able to work on a couple of those bugs. Thanks goes to Chris Hofmann who showed me a couple of nifty tricks and tools regarding crash analysis.
• Mozmill: As the lead of the Mozmill test automation process I had to put focus on Firefox 3.6. So all manual tests from the Smoketest and BFT testgroup, which have been already automated, can be used to run automated functional tests against Firefox 3.6. The same applies to the automated software update tests which make sure that update paths are working as expected. As seen for the previous 3.6 beta and 3.5.x security releases all those tests are very helpful and give time for QA to focus testing on more important areas.

Finally I can say that I’m feeling great with Firefox 3.6 as my daily companion but also looking forward to any upcoming work which has to be done for the next major version of Firefox…

Download and install Fritz!Fax on your Windows machine. A printer driver is installed automatically which is used to send b/w or colored faxes. Works like a charm.

Thanks AVM even it is an unsupported software.

This release is a big step forward by adding a couple of new features and fixing some important bugs which have been found by users and have been introduced by the last release. A complete list can be found on Bugzilla.

Let’s give a short overview and mention some of the fixes/features:

1. Bug 509912: We have updated the maxVersion for all applications. So Mozmill is not compatible up to Firefox 3.7a1pre, Thunderbird 3.1a1pre, and SeaMonkey 2.1a1
2. Bug 508643: From now on new profiles are created by Firefox itself. Before that fix we have used the files from within the default profile folder of the default application. That caused failures for localized builds because the profile has been initialized with wrong profile data.
3. Bug 516729: Tests failed by clicking on elements inside the content area if the window was too small. Now with this fix elements will be scrolled into view before clicking on them.
4. Bug 522990: Nested elements in the content or chrome document weren’t correctly reported by the inspector which didn’t let you get an element string.
5. Bug 512789: Both controller.check and controller.radio functions have been updated to work now.
6. Bug 515072: A second parameter has been added for controller.assertJS which let you specify an object which can be accessed via “subject” from within that function. It allows to show a more detailed information for a failing test.
7. Bug 500987: Restart tests can pass variables between test modules. There is a persisted property available by default which can be used to set/get user-defined values.
8. Bug 515209: Restart tests can have a callback handler written in Python which can be called asynchronously.

If something has been regressed since the last version please file a bug under Testing/Mozmill on Bugzilla.

If you are interested and want to know more about Mozmill then join us in #QA on IRC or subscribe to the Mozmill developer list.

Since ever Firefox is supporting automatic updates we also have to check that each and every user will get the right update package for the installed version of Firefox. Most of our users should run the latest version of Firefox but there are also cases where people don’t update immediately or even don’t want to upgrade to the next major version of Firefox. Given that updates have to be delivered to each of the supported branches (e.g. Firefox 3.0.0.x and Firefox 3.5.x) and also as major update for upgrading to the next major version. We also have a community beta program running where users can help testing beta versions of the next Firefox version. Those users will get a separate update offer on another update channel.

Finally there are 4 different channels we have to test for en-US and some of our P1 localized builds. In detail those are in the right order:

• betatest: This channel makes sure that updates which will be delivered to beta users will pass.
• beta: Beta testers will get their updates on that channel.
• releasetest: This channel tests the update snippets which have been pushed to our official download mirrors.
• release: Default channel for all Firefox installations to get the next version.

For each of those mentioned channels we offer partial and complete updates. The former one will be used if the latest minor version of Firefox is in use, e.g. a user wants to update from 3.5.4 to 3.5.5, while the latter one is for all other versions of the same branch. If an update fails to apply which could happen due to different reasons like a download problem, users will not get stuck on their installed version. In such a case a fallback update will be downloaded which is identical to the complete update. If that fails too the same process will be started again after a given time.

Until now these tests had to be done manually by us. An example can be seen in the update section of the Firefox 3.5.5 test plan. So we normally tests updates on all supported platforms, for each update type (minor, major), and make sure that fallback updates will pass.

With the new software update tests for Mozmill which I have finished two days ago, we can easily automate this process now. The only manual steps which have to be done is to prepare the tests by downloading the necessary builds for all the platforms and place them in their own folders. Once that is done the automated test can be started. It will use all builds within a given folder and runs tests updates for the specified channel. The results are printed in wiki format to the console and only have to be copied to the appropriate Wiki page.

If you are interested in running those update tests you have to install Mozmill on your machine and clone our Mozmill test repository. Detailed steps can be found in the Mozmill test creation tutorial on QMO.

This is a big step forward in a direction where we can run update checks against each localized build of Firefox and can make sure that updates are successfully applied and don’t fail or cause any sort of failure. And it will give QA more time to focus on other topics.

If you are interested and want to know more about Mozmill then join us in #QA on IRC or subscribe to the Mozmill developer list.

Everyone who is using Mozmill regularly is welcome to help us in testing the beta version. As long as no big issues will come up the release of Mozmill 1.3 will happen next week.

If you want to test the extension please download it from Github.

Users of the pyPI packages only have to run “easy_install -U mozmill” to get the latest packages for Mozmill, JSBridge, and Mozrunner.

Thanks in advance.

After a couple of hours using it I will definitely not miss it anymore!

There is a question which I get asked very often from developers: “Why do we need Mozmill tests when we already have a suite of automated tests available?” The clear answer is that those tests are used to simulate user actions on UI elements the same way as when a user would sit in-front of the computer. That means that for example clicks on hidden or disabled elements shouldn’t trigger the execution of the underlying command. That’s the difference to Mochitests which always trigger the command when the synthesizeMouse function is used to click on an element. Another really helpful feature is the capability to run restart tests of any sort. That’s not possible with the existing test harnesses which makes Mozmill test unique.

Seeing the importance of those tests we want to have a full suite of BFT tests for Mozmill by end of Q2 in 2010. The total number of 196 doable tests, except the ones which require OS level interaction, would allow us to run 82% of the tests automated. At the moment 65 of the tests have been already finished and can be run with Mozmill against builds from the 1.9.1 and 1.9.2 branch. For detailed information about the current state and actual work please check the Google spreadsheet.

To get more tests automated the following goals have been set by the QA execution team for Q4 in 2009:

• Firefox 3.6 will be released this quarter. To enhance our testing we want to automate all of the tests in 4 BFT subgroups prioritized as P1. In general these subgroups are: Awesomebar, Add-ons Manager, Download-Manager, and Tabbed Browsing. This will incite us to write the next 40 tests. A list of all available subgroups and their prioritization can be found in the Feature Ownership document.
• For us who are working on release testing, software update tests have to be performed for the betatest, beta, releasetest, and release channels. Given the manual work which have to be performed here automation will help a lot. I will finalize my software update tests so they can be run by everyone.
• Running Mozmill tests you will get results reported in the terminal. Even with the integrated capability to send those reports to a server we don’t have a web frontend to display those results. We want to use Brastacks to visualize Mozmill results similar to the Fennec test results. This work will be a joined effort with Testdev.

If anyone is interested in helping us to write or maintain Mozmill tests you can read more about it in the test creation tutorial or simply join us on IRC and get in contact with whimboo or aakashd. But you can also send me a mail or comment on this blog post. Thanks!

Given my project to get manual Litmus tests automated with Mozmill I have prepared some slides with a special focus on l10n. But sadly I wasn’t able to join the conference because of sickness. I have to say a big thanks to my colleague Marcia Knous and also to one of our main contributors for Sunbird tests Merike Sell who both hold the session. As informed at the end of the session via IRC the talk was a great success and a lot of questions were ask.

Due to the amount of sessions not everyone was able to join the Mozmill session. Also given all the people who weren’t be able to come I have uploaded my slides for all of you now. Please check the embedded Slideshare content below:

Feedback
Because I haven’t got any feedback from localizers so far I’m anxious to hear what you think about the usefulness of Mozmill and testing with localized builds. Given by the current number we have over 70 official locales available which are not tested by automated tests and require manual testing from localizers and contributors on a regular basis. With all the 250 BFT and another 750 FFT tests enabled in Litmus manual testing is a time taking action. Running all the tests with Mozmill will take much lesser time, could be run more often, and could cover all platforms which will result in a higher quality of Firefox and helps us to minimize any new regressions for our huge user base.

Please check the following questions I’m interested in getting an answer:

1. How often does your l1on team run Litmus tests against your locale whether those are BFT/FFT or the localizer test-run?
2. Would you like to see much of those tests automated and are you interested in running those tests on your local machine for each major and stability release?
3. Are you interested to help QA in writing Mozmill tests so we have most of them available as soon as possible?
4. Do you have further ideas how Mozmill can be used in the l10n area additionally to the points I have pointed out in my slides?

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

If you want to use Mozmill to run tests against Shiretoko / Firefox 3.5.x or Namoroka then you can switch between the different branches with the commands seen below.

$ hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/qa/mozmill-tests
$ cd mozmill-tests
$ hg branches
default 108:d8529dd87a77
mozilla1.9.1 106:221ecb1a8ea9
$ hg branch
default
$ hg up -C mozilla1.9.1
$ hg branch
mozilla1.9.1
$ hg up -C default
$ hg branch
default

Given the output default is our current trunk version of the Mozmill tests while the mozilla1.9.1 branch is for Firefox 3.5.x.