- Firedrills
- Protocol Handler Testing
- Intern Brown Bag
- Intern BBQ
- Giants Game
- Songbird Party
- Computer History Museum
Firedrills...
Firedrills are interesting to say the least. I am actually glad that I was able to experience a firedrill or two, or three while I am here.
What is a firedrill? I am glad you asked. A firedrill is an accelerated point release. A typical point release schedule is 6 to 8 weeks. This means that from the time a point release is out, our next point release is typically planned for 6 to 8 weeks from that date.
So what is involved with a point release? Well there is a lot of QA work that goes into a point release. There is update testing, localization testing, smoketesting and basic functional testing. A typical point release involves about a week of QA dedicating most of its' resources to this task. It involves a lot of man hours.
This description really doesn't do the people working on a point release justice, however it gives you a real basic idea of how it works.
Now that you have a basic understanding of what goes into a point release, from a QA standpoint, a firedrill compresses that 6 to 8 week window down to a window of typically one to two weeks, or as Shaver put it "10 days". Of course, we try to get a release out as soon as possible. To ensure quality we usually make it within the one to two week window. This has certainly been the case for the firedrills for which I have been involved. This one or two week window is not just QA either. Everything that takes place in a point release has to happen in these one or two weeks leaving QA only a few days to do testing. It makes for many late nights and sometimes a few weekends. But all of our efforts usually pay off.
What warrants a point release being dubbed a firedrill? Typically it boils down to a security issue or some sort of bug in our code that could be used to harm users. In this instance, it was related to how protocol URIs were being handled when escaping quotes or being passed null values. I will get into this a little bit more later.
As I said earlier, I actually was glad that I was exposed to not one but two firedrills. No, I am not insane. The experience I gained from not only watching but being an active participant in dealing with multiple firedrills is invaluable. I was really able to learn a lot. It was also good to see that we put just as much care into Thunderbird as we do Firefox.
In the end, I believe we have done excellent work in protecting our users against potential flaws. Kudos to everyone involved with this massive effort.
So...spreadsheets *shiver*
Now don't get me wrong. I like spreadsheets as much as the next guy, but this thing was massive. I mean gargantuan! 8 columns times 498 rows comes out to 3984 tests. This was all in an effort to discover what sort of behaviour to expect when firefox 2, internet explorer 6, internet explorer 7, and the command line were passed 498 different protocol handler strings on windows XP and vista. Either way you slice it, it involved about 5 of us spending at least 40 hours each in 3 days to complete. Since we started this late on a Friday, some of us, myself included, came in on Saturday and Sunday so that we were able to complete this exhaustive set of tests late Monday (ahead of schedule). Again, kudos to everyone involved with this effort. That spreadsheet seemed to go on forever, but we were able to complete it and I think it was quite an effective tool. I just hope that in the future we can automate these sorts of tests.
So now, onto some of the lighter hearted events of the last month.
First off, the Intern Brown Bag. This was the first part of a three part series of interns presenting to the Mozilla employees what they had been working on for the Summer. Why three parts? There are so many of us, that's why. We are an intern army! Anyway, 9 of the interns presented what they had been working on for the summer and I have to say, it was really interesting to see the many varied projects that people were working on. There is really so much to do that not one intern was working on the same project, even though there is so many of us. I originally didn't think I had all that much to talk about. I seriously thought to myself, "this isn't even gonna fill three minutes". But I typed up a list of what I had actually accomplished this Summer and I was actually quite impressed. I was able to fill a good 10 minutes of talking time, enthralling the other interns and Mozilla employees. The entire brown bag was recorded and I have a copy of that video. I am still working on getting my section extracted from the video so it is small enough that it can be posted. The long and short of it is that I learned a lot about QA, had a blast doing it, and look forward to continued work in the Mozilla QA community.
The second item of interest was the Intern BBQ which followed soon after. This was organized fairly quickly after an email of disappointment was passed around from Karen to the intern population. What can I say? We aim to please! The intention of the BBQ was to thank the Mozilla employees for the great summer by giving them an evening of RnR at the Oakwood apartments with food and drink prepared and served by their loving interns. From all the feedback we received, it was a fun time had by all. Andrew Stein, one of the marketing interns, was able to snap some great pictures which can be found on my flickr here.
The third event, taking place just this last week, was the Mozilla invasion of a San Francisco Giants game. This was an awesome event. We all loaded onto a bus, enjoyed a brief tailgate party outside the stadium, then went in and watched a rather inactive game of baseball. This game saw the Giants falling to Washington by 3 to 1 (HA!) and saw Mr. Bonds getting out faster than it took him to come up to the plate (double HA!). At it's heart, this event was more about us all getting out and having a good time. I think it was safe to say that we all had a blast.
The fourth event, taking place this past Friday was another Mozillan invasion. This time of Songbird's new office in San Francisco. This was an awesome party. I was actually surprised how many people showed up. I figured there would be mostly Songbird people and Mozilla people there, with Mozilla people outnumbering the Songbird people. There was quite a crowd there. Great music, lots of laughs, a bike blender, great people, and a new found love for Mojitos. The Songbird folks have found a great new nest and I wish them the best of luck. I myself love the Songbird application (built on Mozilla no less) and encourage everyone to at least try it out. Not that any of them read my blog, but keep up the great work guys. It truly gets better with each release.
The final event of this whirlwind month was a rather relaxing afternoon at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. This was quite an interesting, if not geeky, stroll through the history of technology. It was really neat to see some of the relics that I had heard so much about in my freshman computer classes. If you want to see some pictures, I snapped quite a few. They can be found here. What was most interesting wasn't how bulky and obese computers used to be, it was how far technology has come in such a long time. It was really amazing and I encourage anyone visiting the area to check it out. It doesn't cost a cent and will easily eat up a couple hours on a lazy afternoon.
Anyway, I think I am finally done rambling on about what I have experienced in the last month or so. I hope I didn't put you to sleep too much this time. It is probably 10 times more daunting to read through all of this as it was for me to write it, however I am happy you made it this far. I am planning two more posts before I head back to Canada, which will be much shorter than this one. The first will be my take on what an All-hands is all about. The second, and the final post for my internship, will be my final thoughts on the internship.
Cheers!
PS.
You can find slideshow versions of all my pictures at the top of the page (if you feel so inclined).
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