Hello, and Welcome

Hi. My name is Syd Polk, and I recently joined Mozilla. It's a great place, and it is really great to be able to be open about what I work on.

My position is officially titled Technical Lead for Platform QA. So, what does that really mean? I am still figuring it out, but basically, Mozilla is divided into several engineering groups. We have a centralized QA group, with engineers assigned to test various technologies. The base technology for everything is called the Platform Group, and until very recently, has not had dedicated QA.

You are meeting the only dedicated Platform QA Engineer by reading this blog post. Now, most of the platform technology is tested in the other groups. Platform is used to build the browser, for instance, and there are people who test the browser. I was hired to help identify the cracks where other technology does not test something adequately.

One area that we identified right before I joined was WebRTC (http://www.webrtc.org), the technology that allows Firefox users to connect to each other for real-time video/audio chat sessions. Our existing automation for this feature ran the network test on the build machines we have here. They have no external network connections, so the tests used fake audio/video streams on two browser instances on the same machine running only on Linux. While this does verify that the basic connection mechanism is not fatally broken, it does not test interesting network setups, different network characteristics, or video/audio stream quality. It also does not test the WebRTC connections on heterogeneous platforms, nor with differing versions of Firefox. Or, for that matter, with other browsers that support WebRTC, like Chrome or Opera.

So, right now, I am working with a few Mozilla engineers to build a system to address some of those concerns. Should be fun!