Firefox Desktop backlog and new development model

[Gavin Sharp]

One of the important topics at the recent Firefox team work week was
how we work as a team. I wanted to update this list about some of the
changes discussed there.

The week included attendees from the development, UX, product, QA, and
other supporting teams (strategy and insights, metrics, content
services, etc.).

Madhava, Chad and I asked Lawrence Mandel and Marco Mucci to attend to
present a proposal that they developed at our request. The goals of
the proposed changes were to help us prioritize, communicate and focus
our efforts in making Firefox awesome.

The essence of their proposal is as follows:

- create a "Firefox desktop backlog" that encompasses all of the
potential work for the core team and community, in prioritized order.
Many of you have probably already seen bug traffic involving bug
950073, which is how we're tracking this work right now. This backlog
is managed and prioritized by the desktop Firefox leadership team.

- moving to two-week development cycles for the core desktop team. The
goal here is for individual team members to choose work they expect to
perform in that cycle. This is a planning tool primarily - Firefox's
release schedule is not changing (we will have three 2-week cycles in
each 6 week mozilla-central development cycle).

- have regular team planning and status meetings to assign work and
check in on status during these 2-week development cycles

- getting better at estimating and planning work over the two-week
cycles, so that the work we complete is more predictable and regular.

We're planning to start this new process with some members of the team
the week of February 17th, and eventually rolling it out to the
entirety of the core team. We'll be making tweaks as ironing out kinks
in the process as we go along.

I'm quite excited about these changes, and the rest of the team is
too. I'm happy to answer any questions or elaborate on any parts of
the proposal that might not be clear.

Gavin
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[Mike Hoye]

On 2/10/2014, 4:44 PM, Gavin Sharp wrote:
>
> I'm quite excited about these changes, and the rest of the team is
> too. I'm happy to answer any questions or elaborate on any parts of
> the proposal that might not be clear.

I'm pretty stoked about this, particularly as we respin some of our
engagement efforts and get more students involved.

My hope is that the triage process will tag more good entry point bugs
and make higher-value bugs more visible to the community. How (and
when) do you see community members participating in this process?



- mhoye

[Gavin Sharp]

Excellent question!

As you suggest, the fact that we'll have prioritized backlog should
help with finding bugs to work on, for anyone interested in
contributing to Firefox's goals. It will hopefully also broaden the
set of easy to find bugs across a wider spectrum of
difficulty/time-commitment-required. We'll continue to have mentored
bugs, and we'll continue to dedicate time as a team to helping develop
new contributors.

The two week iteration cycle is intended as a tool to help organize
the time of full-time contributors, primarily, so I don't see it
having much impact on part-time contributors. Our meetings will
continue to be open, so community members who want to participate in
the regular planning/status meetings are welcome to do so. For people
who don't have that amount of time available, there should be little
change in the mechanics of contributing - you can still take bugs and
work on them in your own time.

Gavin