Community Driven Testing: Lessons
learned from the BuddyUp Pilot project
Marcia Knous and Ioana Chiorean

What is BuddyUp?
● Single support entry point for users -
integrates support offered on
hardware, software or service issues
● Web app that enables on-device
notifications for an instant answer to
any question you have
A Firefox OS support app

What is BuddyUp?
A Firefox OS support app

Why BuddyUp?
● An opportunity to try something new!
● No dedicated QA resources available for the project
● App was planned to ship by default on the Firefox OS 2.5 release
The Mozilla mission in action: human collaboration across an open platform

Pilot Project Objectives
● Teach contributors skills that would span the mobile testing landscape
● Give contributors a sense of what is like to be part of a QA testing team
● Make it easy for any FxOS user interested to help to become and feel
part of a larger community of helpers
● Develop community mentors

Who participated?
● Two mentors - Marcia Knous
and Ioana Chiorean
● Three community members
○ Christos
○ Fredy
○ Karthikeyan
● First team meeting held in
Mozilla Paris space in February,
2015 (Developers, Project
Management, UX)
Ioana, Karth and Fredy discussing the project

Meetup attendes

How we structured testing
● App divided into three parts
○ Testing as someone asking a question
○ Testing as someone answering a question
○ Profile and Settings
● Owners created a short test plan and test cases for each area

How we structured testing
● Periodic smoketests run to catch regressions
● Community dialed into project meetings and reported status

How did they benefit?
● Gained knowledge in mobile testing, which can help them get a job
● Gained knowledge of how to approach testing an app from a project
perspective
● Worked equally with the staff, as an important member of the team -
they attended team meetings, sent reports, smoketested

How did they benefit?

Challenges and Lessons
● Time zone challenges
● Time based requests are difficult
● Lead Developer left for some time, and the project lost momentum
● Resource balancing
● No automation infrastructure meant lots of repetitive manual testing

Going further
● Created two tiger teams for Firefox OS features (Pin the Web/Control
Center)
● Provided better documentation that can be applied to other projects as
well
● Realized that in-person training is way more efficient than online
meetings so we will try to duplicate this
How BuddyUp experience can help us more

Questions?