{"id":327,"date":"2014-11-21T06:06:20","date_gmt":"2014-11-21T06:06:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/webqa\/?p=327"},"modified":"2014-11-21T06:06:20","modified_gmt":"2014-11-21T06:06:20","slug":"i-am-mozilla-web-qa-meet-stephen-donner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/fxtesteng\/2014\/11\/21\/i-am-mozilla-web-qa-meet-stephen-donner\/","title":{"rendered":"“I Am Mozilla Web QA” — meet Stephen Donner"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"23893_748513078605_1420274950_n\"<\/a><\/b>What do you do at Mozilla?<\/h4>\n

I\u2019m the resident pointy-hair, aka administrative overhead — and some people even call me \u201cmanager.\u201d \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Our team\u2019s most up-to-date and complete page is on the Mozilla Wiki<\/a>. \u00a0As our team name implies, we\u2019re largely responsible and involved in testing many of Mozilla\u2019s websites, as well as on-device applications, like the Firefox Marketplace<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Any fun side projects you\u2019re working on?<\/h4>\n

I\u2019m a geek, but not a coder, so in my spare time, I read up as much as I can about the wireless + broadband internet industries — fascinating stuff (to me, at least), and like most tech fields, it changes quite often, so there\u2019s never a dull moment.<\/p>\n

How did you get started in testing?<\/h4>\n

I\u2019ve been doing it since I volunteered to help test some of the first Mozilla \u201cM3\u201d builds<\/a>. \u00a0I wasn\u2019t accustomed to neither Web nor client testing, but quickly fell in love with reporting bugs — Asa\u2019s testday community (see below) played the instrumental part! \u00a0And although I started off in testing as a volunteer testing clients — Mozilla and Netscape\u2019s email and news clients — I moved into more Web testing while at AOL, and have largely been testing from the Web side of things here, since. \u00a0As with most things test and Mozilla-related, though, I (and our team) often test and report bugs outside our core expertise – there are a lot of inter-related parts among clients, servers, Web applications, etc.<\/p>\n

How did you get involved with Mozilla?<\/h4>\n

It\u2019s a bit of a long story — the full details of which can be found here<\/a> — but, as a longtime Netscape fan, I started contributing to Mozilla nearly as soon as it went open source, through Asa Dotzler\u2019s<\/a> testdays, which led, eventually, to a job at Netscape\/AOL.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s a funny fail or mistake story you can share?<\/h4>\n

In the early days of working with Jake Maul from WebOps, I made the Firefox Support website\u2019s staging instance \u201cfall over,\u201d due to fuzzing it and hitting it with too many weird requests (kudos to the Netsparker tool<\/a> I used, at the time) – we\u2019ve implemented and fixed several things since then, so bringing a server — or even a cluster of them — to its\/their knees — is unheard of (at least the way we test them!)<\/p>\n

What\u2019s something you\u2019re particularly proud of?<\/h4>\n

Our awesome team, and how — while we\u2019ve grown and seen people depart over the years, — we\u2019re constantly reinventing and re-evaluating ways of testing + helping deploy Websites, apps, Firefox OS — and more. \u00a0And to be clear, by saying \u201cteam,\u201d I\u2019m inherently including \u201ccommunity\u201d — check out just a sampling of our amazing community contributions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s coming up that you\u2019re excited about?<\/h4>\n

Where do I start? \ud83d\ude42 \u00a0Container-ized deploys and test\/development-environments using things like Docker, for a start. \u00a0And, just as important are initiatives where Web development and Web QA can (hopefully) share end-to-end testing stacks like http:\/\/theintern.io\/<\/a>, which is a Q4 goal<\/a> in-progress. \u00a0Also, coming up early next year we\u2019re expecting to automate testing with a Marionette-backed WebDriver, built in to Firefox<\/p>\n

What question do you wish you\u2019d been asked?<\/h4>\n

This one! \u00a0Just kidding \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Favorite city that\u2019s not Portland?<\/h4>\n

Durban, South Africa or London — I grew up in the outskirts of the former, and came to really love — within a couple visits from work — the latter (though I had also been there, a few days, as a youth). \u00a0Also, I love small, Western towns — hills, lakes, mountains, and the open roads that lead to them are my friend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What do you do at Mozilla? I\u2019m the resident pointy-hair, aka administrative overhead — and some people even call me \u201cmanager.\u201d \ud83d\ude42 Our team\u2019s most up-to-date and complete page is … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":512,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,278089],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/fxtesteng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/fxtesteng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/fxtesteng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/fxtesteng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/512"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/fxtesteng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/fxtesteng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/fxtesteng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/fxtesteng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/fxtesteng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}