Virtualization and QA

07.02.07 - 04:53pm

Part of the work that I’m doing in QA here right now is focusing on virtualization technologies. This is kind of a project I’ve taken on in order to help create a good environment for our day to day testing.

Back when I first began doing QA work in the mid-90’s, most people involved would have a stack of machines next to or under their desk and a switch box. Tools would be used to wipe machines to a known good state before putting new builds of software on them. If people were really lucky (and moreso as time went on), they would have access to some nice tools, which as client-server imaging software, to automate a lot of this process of getting machines ready.

One of the nice changes over the last five years is the growing amount of virtualization technology being used. Companies like VMware and Parallels are making good businesses at it and there is a reason for it. At my last job, I had to test our software on many different configurations of operating systems and browser types in order to test that our web application was going to work well across the board. Instead of having the bank of machines that I used to have, I was able to do it all on a fairly beefy laptop by using VMware for my work.

Here in the QA group, we’ve been investigating what we want to do with virtualization. I know that we’ve had some discussion about having servers running virtual machines for the community to log into when they have time so that people have access to varied environments. We’re not quite up to that level yet but one of the things I’ve been doing is making a reference set of virtual machines available internally (unfortunately internally because of licensing issues with Windows) so that when a build comes out, we have stable and clean environments to quickly test on. From there, we are working on creating a variety of not-so-clean environments, because most people don’t run Firefox and Thunderbird in some kind of pure clean environment (my home machine is a mess) so we need to be able to test the builds in something more real. Our thoughts around this are being documented in an ongoing basis on the wiki.

If you have thoughts on any of this and the pros and cons of virtualization in general, I’d love to hear about it. Please take a look at the wiki page as well as the thoughts there are pretty preliminary also.

Category: MozQuality | | 3 Comments »

No news yet

06.19.07 - 10:58pm

I’ve finished Day 4 on the job but I’m going away for the rest of a week. I have a trip that was planned before I was hired to go to Ohio.

It looks like I’ll be working with Juan on the next 2.0.0.x release, when it occurs, along with some of the Firefox 3 QA efforts. I’ll probably post a bit more when I have something of substance to add…

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First Day

06.13.07 - 01:31pm

Tomorrow, June 14, is my first day on the Mozilla QA team. I expect it to be a little crazy during the next few weeks. I’m looking forward to working with people both inside and outside the company though.

Category: Misc | | Be the First to Comment »

Self-Introduction

06.08.07 - 11:29am

Hi, I’m Al Billings and this is my blog on the shiny, new blog.mozilla.com site. I acted quickly and have a coveted two letter moniker.

I’m just starting on the Mozilla QA team in the next week (I actually don’t start for most of a week). A few people here and there might know my name from previous work. I worked on Internet Explorer at Microsoft starting in IE4 and 5, taking some time off for other projects, and then continuing in IE6sp2 and IE7. I ran the public Internet Explorer blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie for about a year and a half and also the aborted and much lamented public bug database that was put away after I left the company…

A bit over a year ago, I decided that I was tired of working at Microsoft and living in my birth city of Seattle so I upped and quit, moving to the Bay Area with my wife. I found a job working at MobiTV doing QA for PCTV, which is television on personal computers extending the products that MobiTV offers for cell phones.  This project was (and is) browser based and I spent much of the last year doing primary QA work in Firefox. Much of the PCTV project was done using open source development tools and using Linux as a primary piece of our infrastructure. Recently, members of the Mozilla team and I began talking and they convinced me to see the light and to come work on projects here.

Most of my geek time over the last 20 years has been spent on the Internet, especially the web once it was created. I’ve been on the Internet since 1989, back when we had to hack into the modem dial-in pools at my local university. I’m an ex-moderator of a couple of Usenet newsgroups (soc.religion.gnosis and soc.religion.shamanism) Since the mid-90’s, I’ve had a bunch of domains of my own on the net for various projects of mine, mostly spiritual stuff, and I’ve moderated a number of e-mail lists over the years as well. Before I worked at Microsoft, I was a webmaster at Spry, a Seattle-area startup that put out Internet in a Box, one of the first Windows Internet software suites with its own version of Mosaic.

I’ve been blogging for over five years with my primary blog currently being at arcanology.com. I have a podcast that I’ve begun doing recently called, “Ex Templo: Out of the Temple” that is over at extemplo.org that focuses on some of my non-tech interests.

I have a Bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology from the early 1990’s and I’m currently finishing my Master’s degree at a California State University school. Much of what most people qualify as “free time” is currently being spent on writing my thesis, which is currently about half done at the 70 page mark.

Needless to say, I have a fairly diverse background and I’m really looking forward to working with the members of the Mozilla community on making the best software for the web.

Category: Misc | | 3 Comments »