A week ago I had the pleasure to attend the FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting) in Brussels. As every year Mozilla has been setup its own booth and also got assigned an own developer room for talks. I have used this opportunity to spread the word about our crowd-testing initiative with Mozmill Crowd. Thanks to the committee my talk also got approved and I was able to demonstrate our latest activities in-front of a couple of people. If you weren’t able to attend, you can check my slides below or on Slideshare:
I have to thank everyone for the amazing feedback. A lot ideas have been collected during those 2 days, which now need to be injected into our roadmap. One of the most important items is definitely the way how we offer a testing solution for add-ons. Because of the Jetpack team already offers unit tests via the Addon SDK framework, we should work together to get more add-on authors to create tests for their add-ons, but also to being able to collect more test results from our testing community. It’s absolutely an item for me after Firefox 4 has been released and we have finished our refactoring of the shared modules used by our Mozmill tests. So assume updates by next quarter.
Beside my own activities I was able to visit some other booth and finally got in contact with Bernhard Wiedemann from the openSUSE project, who now also runs our Mozmill tests on a daily basis on their machines. I’m kinda inspired by some of the features they are using, especially the creation of a video for the complete test-run. Features like those would have been already helped us a lot. It’s nothing more frustrating to not being able to reproduce an issue because of lack of information.
A big thanks goes also to the planning team of Mozilla who took care of anything related over this weekend. Thanks for the accommodation, the dinner and bowling party on Saturday and all the other small but necessary stuff. As always it was great to get in contact with our and external communities.
Oh, and some pictures have been uploaded to Flick.