automated test policy for mail/, mailnews/, editor/, directory/ in comm-central

[Dan Mosedale]

[Note that replies are redirected to dev-apps-thunderbird]

As mentioned in previous post-Tb3 planning discussion centered around
<https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Dmose/Tb_Post-3.0_Scratchpad#Testing>, I
believe Thunderbird needs to become significantly more agile by bringing
our testing polices in line with those of the browser/ and toolkit/
directory in mozilla-central. Which is to say that I'd like to start
requiring that all patches to mail/, mailnews/, directory/, and editor/
include automated tests starting Monday, January 4, 2010, except in
cases where it's specifically impractical or not sensible.

I recognize that this will be a different style of development than some
folks are used to and that the change may feel little a bumpy, so I want
to be sure we make this policy change in a humane way. In particular,
I'd like to us to be sensitive to the fact that there are a lot of
patches in progress in Bugzilla today, and that we will suddenly be
asking more of our contributors than we were at the time they started
working on those patches.

For those who haven't already written or run tests using one of our
automated testing frameworks,
<https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Thunderbird/Thunderbird_Automated_Testing>
is a good starting point.

If you have thoughts, issues, or concerns, feel free to reply to this
message either in dev-apps-thunderbird or to me by private email.

Dan