23 February 2013
Welcome to the Mozillians project - A community phonebook to share, identify and communicate with other Mozillians in our community. If this is your first time working on a project at Mozilla or you're a seasoned veteran this is a great project to get involved on.
Exploratory testing is a great way to contribute to the Mozillians project. Many of our integration and functional tests have been automated, but automated tests are best at catching the bugs we can anticipate. Exploratory testing catches the truly interesting bugs -- the ones we haven’t imagined yet -- and gives testers an opportunity to learn about the Mozillians project and platform.
“The main advantage of exploratory testing is that less preparation is needed, important bugs are found quickly, and at execution time, the approach tends to be more intellectually stimulating than execution of scripted tests.” Wikipedia
There are several schools of thought on what exploratory testing is. For our purpose we’ll treat it as a testing approach where a tester through creativity and curiosity seeks to find out how the software works. An exploratory tester simply looks at and uses the software as a normal user might, and asks questions on behalf of the users. This approach reveals places where the software does not behave as expected -- in other words, bugs!
The Mozillians project targets several different types of users:
Your mission if you choose to accept is to creatively explore the Mozillians website, keeping in mind the users it is intended for. As you work through the different areas of the application, apply a critical eye to the design, layout, workflows, and different functionality of the site. If it helps you, keep notes about what you find, questions you may have, and thoughts about additional areas you’d like to test.
Here are few places to start:
To get started you’ll need:
On the Mozillians project all defects and feature requests are tracked in Bugzilla as bugs. Yes! We treat everything as a bug. Not all bugs describe problems in software; some bugs describe feature requests, and some ask for help. We simply use Bugzilla as a ticketing system that helps facilitate discussion.
As you are testing, the types of bugs that you’ll discover will likely fall into three categories:
Sometimes the issues are known or even deliberate. If a feature request has been turned down in the past and you feel it should be incorporated into the application, please file a bug (or ask that a closed one be reopened) and advocate for that feature.
A few tips for filing bugs:
You can always ask us questions if you aren’t sure if what you found should be entered as a bug.
Please let me know how your testing went. I’d love to hear from you!