Saturday, June 02, 2012

Bugzilla 4.2 Support is Finally Here

I know a lot of you have been wondering what happened... Testopia was such an active project, and then suddenly seems to have fallen off a cliff.

About 18 months ago I changed jobs. In my prior position Testopia was my full time job. I was paid to devote 40+ hours a week to its development and maintenance. I enjoyed the work immensely. I would have loved to continue were it not for circumstances with the business outside my control.

As with most job changes there were a lot of other changes that accompanied it. In my case, moving to a new city, new schools for the kids, my wife (a school teacher) moved to a new position as well. It has been a very busy time.

The net result is that Testopia kind of fell by the way side. At my new job, they use Jira instead of Bugzilla. I now spend most of my day programming in Java instead of Perl. The downside is that I have had a hard time switching contexts between my daily work and what has become a side project.

That being said, I do have some good news for all your patience. With the help of LpSolit from the Bugzilla team, I am ready to announce Testopia 2.5 with support for Bugzilla 4.2 is now available to download from Mozilla's FTP. This version no longer requires you to patch Bugzilla. If you are upgrading, you must first reverse the patch from the earlier version before installing the tarball. For new installations, simply untar the tarball in your Bugzilla installation directory and you should be good to go.

A word of caution though. When I released previous versions of Testopia, it was only after it had already had a chance to be vetted in a production environment at my previous employer. I have not had that luxury with this release.

I do appreciate all the comments and questions I have received. I apologize for not being more prompt in my responses. Please know they are received and reviewed, even if it takes a while given my new circumstances. Please continue to send them.

As for the future, I refuse to let Testopia simply die. I have been toying with the idea of adding support for Jira and possibly other bug tracking tools - an oft requested feature. The major constraint is simply time. For now, enjoy the latest, and as always, bugs, and enhancements can be logged at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org and comments and suggestions at support-webtools@lists.mozilla.org.