Moratorium on custom bug-entry form development

[Mark Côté]

One of the many tasks performed by the development team of
bugzilla.mozilla.org (BMO) is the development of custom bug-entry forms,
which are used by several teams, most of which are outside of
engineering, to provide a simpler interface to Bugzilla and to ensure
that specific requests are filed with all the necessary details. While
there are clear benefits to using BMO to store a variety of
task-management data that is not strictly related to engineering, the
BMO team, which consists of only two engineers, spends a significant
amount of development time creating and updating these forms. This time,
combined with the irregularity and unpredictability of these requests,
often significantly detracts from feature and maintenance work on BMO,
which is a critical piece of infrastructure at Mozilla and has room for
improvement in several important areas.

Since the original development of Bugzilla’s custom bug-entry form
feature, BMO itself has evolved to be more generally extensible,
including the development of a REST-based HTTP API, a common interface
for web applications, and "auth delegation", which is a secure way for
users to log into a third-party application that is backed by BMO. This
means that it is now not just possible, but easy, to create a standalone
application that can duplicate and even surpass the functionality of
custom bug-entry forms.

Thus, starting in Q1 of 2017, the BMO team will be putting a moratorium
on most custom bug-entry form work. We will be able to do small updates
to existing forms, such as changes to drop-down selection lists or the
wording of questions, but we will not do any major updates nor create
new forms.

Instead, teams will be encouraged to create their own standalone
applications that use BMO’s APIs to migrate away from built-in custom
forms. We are working on a sample application that can serve as a
template for other forms and will be available for reference by those
building software for your teams. Depending on your needs for access
control, there are alternate applications you can be using to manage
tasks, especially if the tasks you are tracking are not directly related
to software development.

We believe that the BMO development team has much greater impact when
focussing on features that are of common benefit to all BMO users, and
that BMO is in a state in which some features, like custom forms, can be
easily made into external third-party applications, which opens up
development to the greater community and is not blocked by the small BMO
team. We realize this may affect the work of parts of the organization
not directly working on delivering software, and it is not a decision we
have made lightly.

If you have any questions, please let one of us know.

Mark Côté
Engineering Manager, BMO

Emma Humphries
Bugmaster