Beautiful Testing

Building Community

Everything we do on the Mozilla Project is done in ways that encourage participation and involvement from the worldwide community of people interested in making the open Web a reality. This has practical implications for all our test frameworks. We strive to make every test framework as simple as possible to run, understand, and create tests for.

This has concrete benefits for the immediate Mozilla testing community. When our bug triage corps finds an issue with a web page, they can narrow down the problem to a minimal test case. These minimal test cases can then be easily added to the reference test framework. Developers can also easily write tests to determine whether their fixes or new features are working as designed. However, to move outside of the reactive nature of regression testing, we are taking this one step further.

We are beginning a project that will do live comparisons of real-time websites. One of the chief motivations here is to understand the ramifications that our new, next-generation HTML 5 parser will have on websites at large. This real-time comparison engine is being built atop the reference test framework.

As part of the real-time site compare tool, we also plan to invite web developers to submit their own tests for parts of their websites that they would like to include in a special site-comparison test suite. For example, if you were working on a complex navigation system for a site, you might want to submit test markup or a link to a page ...