Jay’s Blog

As part of our QA Community strategy for 2008 I designed a volunteer participation survey in late 2007 as a first step in better understanding our QA contributors.  The survey was available online for about two months from Jan 2  - Feb 27, 2008 and we reached out to contributors via newsgroups, mailing lists, and QMO.  In the end, we had a pretty good sample of 114 responses.

The goal of the survey was to provide the Mozilla QA team a snapshot of what our community looked like and to  gather feedback from volunteers so that we could better plan and execute on our community events and projects going forward.

There is a lot of data, so I plan to break up the results into 3 parts.  Part 1 covers information gathered about the contributors that make up our Mozilla QA community.   I will follow up with Part 2 soon, which will cover how the contributors currently participate in various activities and their preferences on ways to stay involved.   Then I will wrap it up with Part 3 to go over the feedback we collected and discuss what the Mozilla QA team plans to do in 2008 with the knowledge gained from the survey.

Part 1: Community Profile

Usage vs Participation

Though many people have been using Firefox for years, it’s interesting that most of the volunteers that responded have only been active Mozilla contributors for less than 2 years.  It’s good to know that our efforts continue to convert fans into curious community members.   The challenge is to help them find their place within the community and enable them to become regular, long-term contributors.

How long have you been using Firefox? (including Phoenix/Firebird if you know what those are)

Years       Count    Percent
3 - 4 years    49    46%
5+ years       37     35%
1 - 2 years        18       17%
< 1 year              3         3%
Total Responses:    106

How long have you been an active participant in the Mozilla community?

Years       Count   Percent
< 1 year        46    49%
1 - 2 years    16     17%
3 - 4 years       16      17%
5 - 6 years         9      10%
7+ years            7        7%
Total Responses:    93

Test Environments

Almost half of the volunteers that responded used a localized version of Firefox (not en-US).  This was expected given our market share numbers around the world, but the data once again reaffirms that we need to keep our volunteers in Europe, South America and Asia in mind when coordinating community events and projects.

Do you use a localized version of Firefox (other than en-US)?
Locale    Count    Percent
en-GB            11     21%
fr                    10     19%
de                    8      15%
pt-BR             5      10%
zh-CN            3        6%
it                     2        4%
nb-NO           2        4%
ar                     1          2%
be                     1         2%
cs                      1         2%
es-ES               1         2%
fy-NL               1         2%
ja                      1         2%
nl                      1         2%
pa-IN               1         2%
pt-PT               1         2%
ru                      1         2%
sl                       1         2%
Total Responses:    51

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Windows XP was the most popular operating system, but it was nice to see a nice percentage of users on various Linux distros and on Mac OSX.   Some volunteers run multiple operating systems, so I had to clean up the data a little:

Please tell us more about your primary system and/or testing environment (Operating System).

Locale                Count    Percent
Windows XP         52    45%
Linux                          24     21%
Windows Vista        22     19%
MacOS X                   18     15%
Total Responses: 116

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In terms of connectivity, about 98% had some sort of broadband connection with only 2 volunteers still using dial-up.  There was quite a mix of connection details due to our diverse community, but I simplified the results into the following:

Please tell us more about your primary system and/or testing environment (Internet Connection).

Connection                Count    Percent
DSL                                      45     44%
Cable Modem                   30     29%
Other Broadband           22     25%
Dial-up                                      2        2%
Total Responses: 102

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Add-ons are a huge part of the Firefox experience, so it’s no surprise that our QA community have their favorite extensions and themes.  There are too many to list, but here are a few that were the most popular amongst the volunteers that responded to our survey:

• Ad Block Plus
• Chatzilla
• Firebug
• Google Toolbar
• Greasemonkey
• Nightly Tester Tools
• NoScript
• Weave
• Web Developer

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Well, that’s all I have for Part 1.  Not the most exciting or eye-opening data, since most of it falls in line with what we might expect, but it’s nice to know where our volunteers are and what they’re using during their testing.

Part 2 will be a bit more interesting, as we start to look at exactly what people are doing as part of the Mozilla QA community, how involved they are, and what brought them to the Mozilla project.

Stay tuned…