It's been a tiring week and an even more tiring weekend. But the whole while, it has been spectacular.
Updates
There was a lot of testing last week for Songbird's update service. Most of us in QA ran an exhaustive set of tests across all platforms to test the updates on our Staging (internal) server before pushing updates out to our Production (public) server. Once we gave the green light to push updates to Production, we had a brief break before rerunning all of the tests on the production server. Everything went pretty good with one minor glitch affecting update paths for linux users. Users as far back as Songbird 0.4 now have the ability to update to Songbird 0.6.1.
Bugzilla
While processing my daily bugs this last week, a couple of ideas crossed my mind that will eventually make Bugzilla at Songbird better.
- Display certain fields depending on user:
Certain fields, which are for internal use only, are being filled in once in a while by general users filing bugs. While this does not have a huge impact on the bug process, it can be quite annoying to have to "clean up" bugs when you shouldn't need to. The biggest offender is the Cost field. Songbird uses this field to assign a numeric value based on need and complexity. Sometimes I will find a user who has filed a bug putting something like "can't play music" or "loss of data" into the Cost field. It is my opinion that we should only display certain fields to external users but keep all fields enabled for other users (like Songbird employees and Songbird ninjas). - Known Issues identification
It is an often occurrence to have bugs filed that are duplicate issues. From a user stand point, this is quite understandable. As someone who uses bugzilla day to day, I find it hard to search for and accurately find another bug in the system that describes the same issue I am having. How can we expect our users to be any different? My idea is to create a keyword that can be attached to bugs that are classified in QA as "known issues". Not only would this serve as an easy way for us to find current issues when triaging bugs, it also serves the external user as well. On our main bugzilla page there is an RSS feed that grabs results from a bugzilla query of the most recently filed bugs. With a query based on this new keyword, we could put an RSS feed on the main page that displays all the known issue bugs. Then, instead of a user filing a new bug that is only going to get duped, they could add value to the "known issue" by adding their experience and feedback to the already open bug.
In the end, it was decided to implement the keyword (we decided on "hot-dup") but to place the rss feed and hiding fields for future discussion.
Performance
There was quite a bit of performance testing complete this week. Since we have our dedicated performance machines set up with ghost images, it is a lot easier to get back to a clean state. This is beneficial to reporting numbers that are as accurate as possible. We know that each test can now be run from the same machine state. The tests I ran this week compared the start up times of Songbird, iTunes and Windows Media Player on Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista Ultimate, Mac OS X Leopard and Ubuntu 7.10 32-bit. Results were pretty similar to test we had run in the past. There were no surprises, but there is definite room for improvement.
Addon Dev
As a major project next year at school, I am required to develop something of value for the Mozilla Project. I have requested David Humphrey to allow me to contribute something to Songbird. He gave me the OK pending some research and ideas. In my search within Songbird I have come across a couple of different projects I feel that I could take on over the eight months of my next two semesters at school. I'll be sure to blog about it closer to the end of the school year.
In advance of this project, I will need to research and train myself to develop an addon. Mozilla addon development is something that I know very little about. Sure I have looked at some addon code, having reviewed a few addons on AMO before; but code an addon?...forgetaboutit. I could wait until school starts and start to learn then, but I want to get a head start with this project. I want to be able to sit down my first day and be able to start coding. I have been reading a lot of documentation lately and played around with Songbird's Create an Extension tool. I have discovered how to play around a bit with bookmarks and the web-search tool. This is definitely going to be challenging, but it's going to be very interesting and rewarding as well.
I posted my first addon to the Songbird community today. Basically, it adds google.com to the list of available search engines and makes it the default search engine when browsing the internet. This is something that I have gotten used to with Firefox and something that I have wanted in Songbird for a while. I am happy to say that I have been able to add this functionality to Songbird, quite easily, and it is now out there for other people to benefit from.
Having just posted it a couple hours ago, I already have 6 downloads. :D
Extracurricular
To top off my week, I fully planned to have a nice relaxing weekend. However, the gods of fate had other plans in mind. Saturday night I went to a house party in San Francisco, which was awesome. Any party with the two Seths is always a good party. Follow that late night with a few hours enjoying the Pride celebration, which was equally amazing. It is a weird feeling walking down the streets of San Francisco with no streets. It makes me wonder how different our world would be without the automobile. It was a great weekend, but oh so tiring.
So after a long and busy week, and a fun and tiring weekend, I am back at the office for what will surely be another busy yet awesome week.
As always, thanks for reading. Cheers.
