Dave Hunt

It’s a new year, and time for me to post an update on the state of Firefox performance test engineering. The last update was in July 2019 and covered the first half of the year. This update covers the second half of 2019.

Late in 2018 I stepped out of the familiar position of automation engineer, and into the unknown as an engineering manager. A new team was formed for me to manage, focusing on performance test engineering. Now here we are, just over six months in, and I’m excited to share some updates!

In July I took the train up to beautiful Edinburgh to attend the EuroPython 2018 conference. Despite using Python professionally for almost 8 years, this was my first experience of a Python conference. The schedule was packed, and it was challenging deciding what talks to attend, but I had a great time and enjoyed the strong community feeling of the event. We even went for a group run around Holyrood Park and Arthur’s Seat, which I hope is included in the schedule for future years.

I’m excited to announce that you can now run the Python unit tests for packages in the Firefox source code against Python 3! This will allow us to gradually build support for Python 3, whilst ensuring that we don’t later regress. Any tests not currently passing in Python 3 are skipped with the condition skip-if = python == 3 in the manifest files, so if you’d like to see how they fail (and maybe provide a patch to fix some!) then you will need to remove that condition locally. Once you’ve done this, use the mach python-test command with the new optional argument --python. This will accept a version number of Python or a path to the binary. You will need to make sure you have the appropriate version of Python installed.

With Firefox Accounts, you can access your tabs, history, and bookmarks from any device. You can even send tabs from one device to another, which is great when I find myself on a page that’s not optimised for mobile, or if I get distracted at the weekend and find something I want to pick up when I get to work on Monday morning. While these features are awesome, I’ve had issues when the sync isn’t triggered, or things don’t go as expected. Some of these issues are known (and are being addressed), but currently it’s too easy for regressions to be introduced.

When testing services that depend on Firefox Accounts, it’s useful to be able to create disposable test accounts. Fortunately we’ve had this ability from the very early days of the service, and our automated tests make heavy use of PyFxA to create, verify, and ultimately destroying accounts. As useful as this is, it hasn’t been particularly easy to create accounts for the purposes of manual testing. For the rare occasion that I’ve needed an account, I’ve either created them manually via main user interface with a disposable email account, or I’ve created a simple one-off script to create a batch of accounts. As I had this need again recently, I decided to write a simple command line tool for creating verified accounts and subsequently destroying them.