Standard8’s Blog

MozMill make harness for Thunderbird testing

Thunderbird has been lacking front-end user interface tests for a while. We aren’t easily able to run mochitest or chrome tests, so we’ve been relying on xpcshell-tests and our nightly testers.

Hence, since MozMill was initially released, we’ve been looking at it to drive our front-end testing on Thunderbird. Over the last couple of months, Andrew and others have been writing MozMill tests to cover their work. The biggest set of these is the folder-display tests that were written to cover the re-factoring of the code behind the folder and message displays.

Whilst they have been doing that, I have been driving forward, with Andrew’s and Ludovic’s help, making a MozMill harness capable of running the tests with Thunderbird and hooking it into the build system. As a result, from today, if you do a Thunderbird build and have the appropriate MozMill components installed, you can now run:

make mozmill

and this will run all the mozmill tests that we’ve got checked in. There’s also a mozmill-one target for running a single test or a single set of tests.

With this simple way to run it, we’re now looking at hooking up a tinderbox to run the tests whenever someone checks in - just like our other test boxes. The tinderbox will initially just be a box we’re testing the automation on - there’s a few rough edges we need to smooth out e.g. installation of mozmill, how stable is it as a platform etc - but it is a start. More on that once it is up and running.

There are also other ways we are thinking of extending these tests - hooking up to fake servers and including as part of make package - so that anyone can download the tests and run them on a relevant build (and write more!).

Documentation for how to install and run the Thunderbird MozMill tests can be found on devmo.