Last fall, Mozilla announced its Mozilla Open Source Support program, specifically focused on supporting the Free & Open Source Software movement. AND THIS JUST IN: Intern was selected to receive a MOSS award in the amount of $35,000!
Initially focused on awarding grants to fund projects used in its own development initiatives, Mozilla is giving back to the OS ecosystem by directly sponsoring development on these open source projects! With Intern specifically, the following improvements will be implemented:
- Performance with an emphasis on benchmarking and regression analysis
- Visual regression testing with screenshot comparison and image analysis
- Accessibility focused on analysis against known accessibility best practices
Goals
The goal with each of these additions is to go beyond standard unit and functional testing and further automate the types of tests that developers should be running with each commit, to prevent regressions in their applications. Automation is the best way to ensure that attention is paid to these details.
Accessibility. Because Accessibility is often overlooked by engineers, we’ll be implementing an automated mechanism to prevent breaking obvious accessibility guidelines as a solid, first step towards making accessibility easier to manage.
Performance benchmarking. This is a challenge to get right, as it depends on many conditions and most front-end engineers struggle with how to make these results statistically meaningful. We will automate statistically meaningful performance tests as much as possible to prevent the introduction of changes that slow down performance.
Screenshot analysis testing. The work done here will help reduce the amount of manual testing that is needed with changes to an application’s style and markup, something that is typically overlooked with current JavaScript testing tools.
As always, our overall objective is to provide the best possible, integrated testing framework for JavaScript developers and we think these three items are achievable with the MOSS grant. Development is underway and we can’t wait to land these enhancements soon!
Thank you, Mozilla!
As active co-creators and maintainers of Intern, we’re excited and impressed by Mozilla’s generosity with this structured approach to supporting Intern and the open source community as a whole.
Mozilla has long been a respected contributor in the open source community and serves as a role model for reciprocity to development organizations everywhere. Building on this presence, Mozilla’s implementation of its MOSS program provides a new level of support that creates value and promotes the future of the open web. Thanks for all you do, Mozilla!
Become an Intern Sponsor!
If there are specific features or enhancements you’d like to see with Intern and are interested in sponsoring development, let’s talk about it!