What is so special about 267194?

Today I landed the final patch for bug 761125.  This is a huge milestone for Firefox Android automation as we had been running 23,531 checks for each push by running known good directories of tests but now we will be running 290,725 checks by running ALL test cases except the 282 known test cases which fail, timeout, hang, crash.

I fully expect a lot of new random failures to crop up, this is just the nature of automated testing.

For the PI geeks out there, 267194 can be found at the 2051st digit of PI

Android unittests now have LOLcat

One common critcism of the android unittests is there is no logcat information.  I could go on for a long time about the decisions made from day 1 up to today, but the main thing is we have found adb to be very unreliable and we connect via telnet to a SUT agent on the tegra.  No usb cable or active adb session for all the automation we do.  This means collecting logcat information is not as easy as issuing a ‘adb logcat > testrun.log’. 

Today I landed bug 754873 which collects logcat information and puts it in the log file generated by tinderbox.  This does not capture the entire logcat session, but it does filter out the random noise that shows up in our logcat coming from tegras (dalvikvm and network wifi messages).  We will display up to 500 messages if they exist.  As logcat is a rotating queue of logs, it will be rare that we find a full 500 lines of useful information in the logs.  What this will solve is when we have a crash in Java or some other crash that is not detected by the crashreporter we will be able to see it in our tinderbox logs.

random fact: did you know you can do ‘adb lolcat’ and it will produce the same output as ‘adb logcat’