Rob Sayre’s Mozilla Blog

Reading posts from Shawn and Edward, who have been doing a great job with testing, I see that we’re hitting a bit of inertia with testing requirements, review policies, approvals, etc. I think this is a real problem, and we need to find a way to reduce the number of hoops. I don’t think waiving testing requirements will be the way to go.

In Shawn’s post, he raises the issue of requiring tests from new contributors. This is a harder situation. I think it’s best not to require tests from new people, especially on their first patch, unless there is something easy for them to cut and paste. As they become more involved in the project, they’ll need to step up their game. But this presents a dilemma. Code that needs patching from external contributors is probably stuff that really needs tests. That means module owners and peers should be finding ways to cover testing of these patches. I don’t have an answer here, but we’ll have to find one.

All that said, regressions aren’t fun, so let’s keep our perspective balanced.