Contributor Spotlight: Glenn Howard

This month WebQA would like to extend thanks to Glenn Howard, and to highlight some of his work for our team. Glenn is an automation engineer who has made a big impact on our wiki-tests repository! You can see the projects he’s helped out with on Github:

https://github.com/glennhoward

Glenn has been contributing for a year and a half so far. He manages to fit it in on top of his job- and we really appreciate the time and effort he puts in! He puts in a few hours per week, whenever he has spare time. This kind of regular contribution makes a big impact. Any contributor who can help out, even for short bursts of time, makes all of the difference in our projects. Our volunteers make it possible to extend both the depth and breadth of our testing!

“As busy as he undoubtedly is, Glenn still finds time to contribute more than just the great tests for our critical wiki.mozilla.org site — he contributes ideas and exudes enthusiasm for Web testing (and not just Mozilla’s) in a lot of different aspects; we’re always grateful to have him participate in our meetings and mailing-list discussions!” – Stephen Donner

Glenn currently resides in Dublin, Ireland where he works as a full time Automation QA Engineer with Gilt.  While Mozilla headquarters is located in California, our contributors and employees cover the globe. We have people helping out in many different timezones. While our IRC channel definitely has prime times for being busy, you can always try connecting with us there. If you’d like to contribute and have questions about the info on our team page, you can try clicking this link to get into our IRC channel. IRC is where our community comes together to find work, ask questions, and to get to know one another.

We always like to ask our primary contributors how they found us, and what got them started contributing to our team. Here is what Glenn had to say:

 I was looking for some Selenium/WebDriver examples and came across Dave Hunt’s blog, from this I found the mozwebqa team. I had used Firefox for quite some time and when I discovered that I could help give back, as well as learn some python, I couldn’t wait to help out and it went from there.

My favourite type of issue to work on is one that lets me contribute with others and that really gets me thinking. Being able to work with others on tough issues is great as it pushes you and well as lets you learn from others.

When asked what he’d tell a newcomer who was thinking of contributing:

Do it! Not only will you get a chance to work/contribute with some really amazing and passionate people, you’ll also get a chance to expand your own knowledge in the process. I’ve met some really great like-minded people which makes it fun to contribute and help out.

This is an important part of contributing- the ability to network with others. You get the chance to contribute work, but you also meet new folks and learn a lot in the process. Our contributors help knit the fabric of our community and play an important part in getting new folks started.

Glenn has been an incredible addition to our community. His passion for Mozilla’s mission is apparent as he fluently works on projects, helping identify coverage gaps and creating test automation. I’ve enjoyed spying on him and watching as he helps on-board new community members, helping untangle the Mozilla fire-hose of information overload and sharing his infectious excitement with new community members. ~ Matt Brandt

Glenn’s contributions span far beyond his github pull requests! We value all of the people who make the time to become a regular part of our community. Particular thanks go to Glenn for all of his help, the whole QA team appreciates your work!