An Overview of the Software Engineering Process and Tools in the Mozilla Project

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An Overview of the Software Engineering Process and Tools in the Mozilla Project


TheMozilla Project is an Open Source Software project which is dedicated to development of the Mozilla Web browser and application framework. Possessing one of the largest and most complex communities of developers among Open Source projects, it presents interesting requirements for a software process and the tools to support it. Over the past four years, process and tools have been refined to a point where they are both stable and effective in serving the project’s needs. This paper describes the software engineering aspect of a large Open Source project. It also covers the software engineering tools used in theMozilla Project, since theMozilla process and tools are intimately related. These tools include Bugzilla, a Web application designed for bug tracking, bug triage, code review and correction; Tinderbox, an automated build and regression testing system;
Bonsai, a tool which performs queries to the CVS code repository; and LXR, a hypertext-based source code browser.

Keywords: open source software, free software, software engineering, software process, software engineering tools, bug tracking, nightly builds, code versioning.