I’d like to announce a couple of minor changes to team structure, now that we’ve got so many products releasing on a regular cadence. For sake of focus and longer term expertise, we plan to clearly separate our attention across shipping products. The delineation was based solely on differing interests on the team (which is fantastic).

Release Management

• Alex Keybl
• Firefox Desktop/Mobile/Metro Focus
  • RM Lukas Blakk (focus lead)
  • Incoming Candidate – apply here
  • Community Release Management – get involved!
• Firefox OS Focus
  • Sr. RM Preeti Raghunath (focus lead)
  • RM Bhavana Bajaj

Our Firefox OS release managers will typically be focused on a single converging release, while our desktop/mobile release managers will continue to track a release each. I’ll manage both groups and pinch hit as necessary. Our hope is that this model will enable release managers to better embed within the (now separate) product orgs.

While this is our target structure, you’ll find that these lines won’t be perfectly clear until the new year. At that time, Bhavana will have the opportunity to focus completely on Firefox OS 1.3 convergence after passing the baton of desktop releases and Metro (post-launch) to Lukas.

It’s only been a couple of years since Mozilla had a single major product focus and one release manager. Now we have a solid and growing team, even bringing community into the fold! Thanks to the team for making this possible.

What’s Winqual?

Winqual is a site and service provided by Microsoft that enables us to look at data collected from Microsoft Windows Error Reporting (WER). If you’ve ever run into a Firefox crash/hang, seen something like

and clicked “Send Error Report”, your crash was reported to Microsoft and made available to Mozilla through the Winqual website. Continued…

Just in case you haven’t heard yet, we recently announced the Mobile Test Drivers (MTD) Program with a goal of increasing Firefox for Android testing coverage. For those of you familiar with “dogfood” programs at other organizations, we’re trying to accomplish something very similar.

We’re looking to build a diverse community of Mozillians (staff and volunteers) who will come together to test nightly builds of Firefox for Android, file bugs, and provide regular feedback. We’ll be teaching everybody involved how to test and file bugs through a set of simple tutorials, and there will be plenty of opportunities to ask questions.

The initial focus of this program, much like the mobile refresh, will be on small form factor devices. We’ll have a (limited) supply of Android phones available for Mozilla staff and volunteers who don’t already have an Android phone.

For Americans in the audience, Thanksgiving is a time for giving – so please consider joining us and giving your time to the MTD cause. For everybody else, just look into this fox’s eyes and try to tell him no…

Sign up now!

Update: For anyone interested, we went live with the Aurora notes a couple of weeks ago – https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/10.0a2/auroranotes/. We’ll be making even more progress towards these goals, over the next cycle. Stay tuned.

There’s been a desire to put out Aurora release notes starting next week. That makes this a fantastic time to rethink the release notes, their audience, and their purpose. For an example of what we’re currently using, you can take a look at the 8.0 beta release notes.

We’ve identified a few issues with the current notes (after the break) Continued…

Copy/paste seems to be the best method for viewing unlinked bug numbers in bugzilla right now. Given how tedious that can be, I’ve thrown together a small OS X service that allows you to select a block of text in an app and directly open or list the included bug #s on bugzilla.mozilla.org. Note that bug #s <101 and between 1990-2020 are ignored for correctness and convenience. The download, source, and install info is after the break. Continued…