Who is this guy?
- Name: Ludovic Hirlimann
- Based in: The Netherlands
- Status: Mozilla Employee
- Job title: Quality Assurance Lead for Mozilla Thunderbird
- Distinctive features: Clown (can’t refrain from jokes), hobbyist photographer, vocal about any topic, in love with the Mozilla community.
Background:
Don’t be fooled by his childish face and his never-ending jokes. Ludovic started in Information Technology ages ago – in the 80’s. He anticipated the trend starting with Apple computers, then moving to Linux, discovering the Internet and its web browsers. Being curious, he was attracted to Mozilla very quickly as it was already cross-platform, which was appealing for someone who was using Mozilla in the office and Camino at home. As he became a fan, he started using only Mozilla. As he never does things halfway – work or jokes – he started reporting bugs and moved on to writing patches. He helped with product localization. And through all that, Ludovic became part of the newborn Mozilla community.
Fact:
In 2008 Ludovic’s dream came true when he officially joined the Thunderbird team as an employee. He has since became the QA leader.
What is his role all about?
The main responsibility of a QA lead evolves around the “test plan”. This is the plan that documents the strategy that will be used to verify and ensure that a product meets its design specifications and other requirements.
Beyond this initial definition, it means maintaining the plan, executing tests according to plan, writing test plans for new features and testing the new features, maintaining the bug database and finally testing releases.
A typical day in the life of Ludovic:
- Update his Thunderbird nightly build, and also updates Firefox to make sure he is working with the latest versions.
- Reads and responds to email messages.
- Bugmail (following all the MailNews Core and Thunderbird component and a few extras) and processing bug reports.
Why help Ludovic?
By helping Ludovic, you participate in delivering a better product to millions of users. You can provide feedback on features that are under development, influencing the software while making it more secure and easier to use. You get the experience of working on an application used by over 20 million people, and learn about open source software development and testing.
With Ludovic you will never get bored! This guy keeps joking. And you will be lucky to discover somebody who is sincere and who honestly loves the community. Ludovic is ready to help you become a Mozillian. Click here to start a conversation!
Ludo says:
“Since we started the rapid release cycle (one Thunderbird release every 6 weeks), we spends a lot of time testing the builds and making sure the updates are bullet-proof. It would be great to have more contributors helping with this, working with Beta or Earlybird versions of Thunderbird and making bug reports. This is a critical activity to help ensure the level of quality of Thunderbird and to discover bugs before we release to users.
“For contributors who have less time, we have Testdays where we look for help testing one feature in particular.
“In addition to this, we need more automated tests. We have a range of tests already implemented, and we could direct contributors to areas where we explicitly need more testing and where developers would be able to help test-writers.”