Litmus is a great tool used by our QA community for testing purposes. With a wide range of test cases grouped in test runs, it’s probably safe to say that it covers all aspects and features of Mozilla products. You can read all about Litmus over at QMO, in the Litmus tutorial.

If you want to test your localization of Firefox 3.5 using Litmus, the best place to start is the 3.5 l10n test run. It’s a great way of giving your testing a structure, which will help make sure you cover all localization. It’s also very helpful when testing periodically—by following the test run, you’re sure not to miss anything that you tested last time.

To do a Firefox 3.5 l10n test run for your locale, go to the Firefox 3.5 l10n localizer test run on Litmus and sign in. You can also created a new account if you haven’t already. Or, go to litmus.mozilla.org and choose Firefox 3.5 l10n localizer test run from the list of active test runs. (You may have to click View all available test runs at the bottom of the page first.)

Next, fill in your Build ID, Platform and Operating System, and, most importantly, your locale. Click Submit configuration. On the following page you’ll see testcases subgroups available in this test run. Right now there are no testcases in the RTL (right-to-left) subgroup, so just click Submit in order to proceed.

As of this writing, there are 23 testcases to go through, and for each of them you can indicate a result: not run, pass, fail or test unclear/broken.  Please leave a comment when a testcase fails or the instructions are unclear or outdated.

When you’re done (you don’t have to do all testcases at one time), just click Submit All Results. Congratulations, you’ve just contributed to the testing efforts to ensure best quality of your localization!

There are other test runs available on Litmus, many of them more detailed and more thorough than the l10n test run (e.g. the catch-all test runs). You’re encouraged to perform these tests to provide even more testing coverage for your locale, but generally they’re not required to move a locale out of beta.

You may also be interested in seeing how much testing has already been done for your locale. It’s simple. Just go to the Search Results page, choose your locale on the far right and hit Show Results. You may also want to specify the product, branch and platform, as well as the timespan (e.g. show only tests performed in the last 2 weeks).

If you’d like to have more information about how to use Litmus, be sure to check out the tutorial on QMO. If you have questions, don’t be shy and do ask us in #l10n or #qa.

Take the survey now.

We all know the localization process is much more than translation. As much as it consists of actually translating the strings that you see in the product’s interface, it also involves lots of other activities, such as adapting the product to the need of the local users (think default search plug-in for example), making sure the first-run experience is good for the local users (web parts: the firstrun page, the ‘Getting started’ page etc.), and that the software update process will also be available in the user’s language. It also involves a fair share of testing and quality assurance, to make sure everything is in place the day of the release.

During all the years of active work, many localization teams have worked out their own practices and procedures regarding testing. We called them “testing plans”. Now, you may think that this is too much of a word in some cases, but we like to think that even a short list of things to check (e.g. accesskeys) before the release is, in fact, a simple testing plan. And it is equally interesting to see what items are included in such a list, as well as how the list itself is stored, presented and maintained (litmus, wiki, google doc and  many other possibilities).

So it’s natural that when Mozilla starts thinking about localization testing plans, we first look at what’s been already invented and proved to work well. There are many localization teams, each with their own way to test the localization, suited for their needs and resulting from their approach and past experience. What if we could share these practices between the localization teams  and help other teams adopt them?

The above briefly summarizes the discussion we had on the objectives of the survey. If you would like to help us, please take the survey! :)

It consists of 20 questions, split into four sections:

• Section 1. Tell us about you and your team
• Section 2. Test Cases, Testing Coverage and Planning
• Section 3. How can Mozilla help?
• Section 4. May we contact you?

It should take about 10 minutes to complete. Thanks!