First of All the event is virtual, it happens online - this is for practical reasons, it would be very difficult to have people living in Singapore, the US east coast or The Netherlands to meet and work in the same physical place. We do bother to have an event because sometimes when looking at a problem or at something new being able to ask other if they see the same thing is valuable, because they might know something you don't or might have encountered the same issue earlier etc ... The value of the event is communicating with other people doing the same thing as you do, but with a different perspective. This is specially true for people who want to join. Asking the people that have been doing quality for quite some time will be available to help new comers.

We are using a distributed chat system called IRC, which is available with dedicated clients or through a web interface. As all the people available for a chat are not always in front of the chat window, you might not get an immediate answer. Typing a name a person being in the chat room will help you get noticed and get a faster answer. And don't be afraid to ask or participate , it's not that difficult.

Now that you know how those events take place, you might be interested in figuring out the subject that is going to be going on during the event. We publish a wiki page for each event that take place, and we have an other page referencing all past and future events (well most of the future events are being announced on a weekly basis). This week for example will be focused on duplicate events. I'm also announcing the events on Thunderbird dev mailing list.

A FFT is made up of 45 areas of tests. Each area containing from one to thirty tests. Each test looks like the screen-shot below :

As you can see there are two columns. One containing what to do on the left. While the right column contains what to verify. The lower part of the screen being used to report how the the product behaved with regards to the test. Nothing really complicated.

As stated above there are a good amount of testing. To test Thunderbird 3.0 RC as extensively as possible the QA Team is looking for volunteers that are willing to devote from 20 minutes to an hours to do some tests. The idea is to divide work. Instead of having everybody concentrating on the Installation phase - we can have people looking at some parts of Thunderbird that are not tested so often. To Participate to this effort you will need :

• From 20 minutes to an hour.


• An account on Litmus - the tools where the test are and the result will be.


• An account on bugzilla - so you can report bugs if you find some.


• To send me an email (see below) so I can divide the work and let you know what to tests.

I'm asking people to sign up so I can divide the work, and send them an individual email when the builds are ready. That email will contain precise instructions on what to test, on how to get in touch with the QA team if you have an issue while testing and don't know what to do. To sign up send me an email at ludovic@mozillamessaging.com , with the following information :

• What OS you'll be testing on (we need a few more mac users and linux users btw)


• What kind of account you have (ie. POP, NNTP, RSS, IMAP)


• Anything you would like to test in particular (your interests)

Testing now is the best way for you to enjoy the new features of Thunderbird 3.0 and to make sure the things you care about are working.

nshopik:
my name is Nikolay Shopik, I'm 27 years old was born and grow up in Moscow, Russia. I'm on XP but have plans upgrade to Windows 7 as soon it will available

Me:
How long have you been using Thunderbird , what do you use it for (Email, Rss) ?

nshopik:
If I'm not mistaken since end of 2006 or early 2007, I only using Email. I was doing RSS in stand-alone app till 2004 and replace it with web based rss readers.

nshopik:
forgot to add I'm reading news too

Me:
Now let's get to the QA specifics part ....

Me:
How long have you participated at triaging Thunderbird MailNews bugs ?

nshopik:
I've been "signed up" in April 2008

Me:
can you described your sign-up process ? was it complicated ? was it hard to become an active member ?

nshopik:
My first bugs dates back to 2007, so I know little bit. Well it's not so difficult at all. I have done QA in my past for my own programs and friends of mine. Only problem you will face to be active member is free time

Me:
How much time do you spend helping Thunderbird quality assurance ?

nshopik:
When I was started in 2008 it took about of 8-12 hours per week. Now I have little bit lower available time and change my priorities on component specific bugs this takes no more 3 hours per week

Me:
Which components do you have special bonds with ?

nshopik:
I'm mostly interested in enterprise/universities environment specific bugs.You know every year TB is losing more and more regular users who tend to use web-based email. They already have problems understand all type of technologies and to know what IMAP or SMTP servers are and what its hostnames. People can barely remember their passwords contain 8 charters.

Me:
nshopik:  this mean Ldap, kerberos . Is it fun participating ? what do you get from helping (joy , pride) ?

nshopik:
Yeah - LDAP, Kerberos, Certeficated based auth, Autoconfiguration via MCD and core IMAP, SMTP protocols. I'm really enjoying helping resolving issues, there some of pride. I'd like to help someone to resolve issue, this encourage people to suggest such product to others instead switching app. And others could be another user or who can even help with providing patch to resolve issue. Also I...
...don't like monopoly of Microsoft email-based products in enterprise segment. But I'm not MS hater I was Microsoft ONLY IT guy in past.

Me:
So do you feel like Thunderbird 3 is something that you've helped build ? do you feel like it's a bit your baby ?

nshopik:
Definitely. Yeah little bit.

Me:
Do you use extensions ? if yes can you list them ?

nshopik:
Not much, nightly tester tools, gcontactsync, that's it.

Me:
Anything you would like to add ?

nshopik:
I wish enterprises spend more resources on open source app like TB instead of throwing it out just after they find out it doesn't support just one feature or has some imporant bug for them unfixed. They do have much more money and/or money to do this.
and/or manpower to do this

Me:
Thanks a lot for your time

nshopik:
Sure, always welcome

Dear Ludovic Hirlimann, Over the past several years, security compliance requirements have become more restrictive, while the technology infrastructure necessary to meet these requirements has expanded greatly. Despite our strong desire to continue providing the Thawte Personal E-mail Certificate and Web of Trust services, the ever-expanding standards and technology requirements will outpace our ability to maintain these services at the high level of quality we require. As a result, Thawte Personal E-Mail Certificates and the Web of Trust will be discontinued on November 16, 2009 and will no longer be available after that date.

Deciding to conclude these services was a difficult decision for us to bear, specifically because of the community that has been built around these products over the years.

To express our gratitude and sincere appreciation for being a part of our Thawte community, we would like to offer you up to $100.00 off the purchase price of our SSL and/or code signing certificates.

If you would like to take advantage of our offer, please forward this email to our sales department. Their contact details are listed at the foot of this message. Please note that this offer expires on November 16, 2009.

We have also made a special arrangement with VeriSign regarding replacing your personal email certificate. VeriSign's exclusive offer to you is for a FREE 1-year replacement personal email certificate - a $19.95 value. This offer will be open for 2 months after the service is discontinued and will no longer be available after January 16, 2010. Simply follow appropriate link below to request your certificate:

That email is not even signed - while the service was about digitally signing emails. But let's see the nice point in the email, they give you an alternative which is free for the first year. A good initiative, plus if you used to be involved actively in the Thawte web of trust, you get a free bonus.
I browsed quickly on the verisign website and it took me a while to locate the equivalent cert (and that page states that Apple Safari is a compliant email client).
The bad part is the lost of the community aspect of Thawte's certificates - the web of trust is gone. I was unable to find a web of trust mentioned on verisign's website.

If you are looking for other alternative - I know of Two. The first one is from Startcom, which offer the same Free certs Thawte will cease to offer. StartCom also offers Web of trust services using http://www.startssl.org/ as a website. The other good news about startcom is that the founder is involved with Thunderbird's qa process.

The other is the of course Pretty Good Privacy, Gnu Privacy Guard :-) which is based on the web of trust concept.

Can you introduce yourself a bit to our readers :

Hi! I'm Gary Kwong, now a 3rd year college student at National University of Singapore. I come from Hong Kong, and I love traveling around the world to meet people and visit new places.

What age you are ?

I'm 23 this year, I started touching Mozilla stuff in-depth when I just started high school, back when Thunderbird just branched out from the old Suite in 2003.

Where do you live ?

Singapore for school, Hong Kong for summer (usually).

What's your relationship with mozilla and thunderbird in particular ?

I started off creating Thunderbird installers in 2003, then started The Rumbling Edge in 2004. QA gradually increased since then, and there's nothing more fun than squishin' bugs. :)

How long have you been using it ?

4-5 years - Thunderbird taught me more about the email stuff (POP, IMAP, SMTP, eml format, etc.) way more than school did, wrt. the practical usage aspect. Even the QA process came out of Thunderbird too - it makes sense when generalizing and applying to other products in the IT industry (with some modifications, of course).

What os/platform do you use it on ?

Usually on the Mac Leopard, but recently on Ubuntu Linux too. I've touched Thunderbird on WinXP and Gentoo Linux as well.

What are your area's of interest when doing Quality assurance ?

Squishin' bugs - and especially being able to help others triage and resolve bugs too, so we have more manpower. Second opinions are sometimes needed.

Why do you participate in the quality effort ?

It's part of the grand open source crusade - my development skills aren't as professional as some others, so I found my calling in QA.

Why ? What do you get from it ? Is it fun ?

I find it exciting when I get a crash. No, seriously, it shows that anybody, as long as "If you put your mind into it, you can accomplish anything." (-quote from Back to the Future)

I learn a lot from the QA process, the bug filing procedure(s) and subsequent remedial action (be it a patch by others, or otherwise). I hope others can learn through QA too - it opens up doors to their lives, as they interact with people around the world working towards a common goal. One might become a better person, learn more skills, meet more people, etc.

(yeah, this sounds very philosophical but that's the way it is)

What do you think about TB3 ?

It's a long time comin'. There's more coming after that, I'm sure, so it's not like TB3's the end of the world. However, our route to TB3 has been long and hard, so I hope it won't have to go through the same large obstacles again.

Do you think you own part of it because you do QA ? Do you like it ?

Sure - being part of a vision that other people around the world also have, is a satisfying experience. :)

How do you use Tb yourself ?

Shredder - feel free to shred my bugmail (it has only eaten up some mail once, that was a few months back), else stable with many Gbs of data in various mailboxes. I use Archive often, but seldom touch Filters / Spam filtering.

Extensions ? - Which one ?

Bugmail, DOMi, Gloda Plugin: Bugzilla, Lightning, MozMill (it's the future in automated QA UI testing, folks!), Google Calendar provider, ViewAbout.

Anything you would like to add ?

Yeah! Thunderbird QA welcomes contributors from all walks of life, with all sorts of skills. As long as you have the passion and the willingness to learn, there's sure to be something available for you to be a part of.