Sheriffing/Outage Notice

DRAFT

Note this is a draft and more concept idea - so work in progress

Introduction

Development Work at Mozilla depend a lot on open Trees like Mozilla-Inbound, Fx-Team and even Mozilla-Try. Sheriffs maintain and control the Status of the Trees and Close Trees if needed.

Mostly this Tree-Closures are due failing Code (like Build Bustages, Test failures) and are this Tree Closures are normally fixed very temporary. However we might have cases where we have longer Tree-Closures due to Infra Related Problems that are UN-planned and need deeper investigations by Teams like IT,Releng, Taskcluster etc

For this cases we might need notifications to Developers to :

• Avoid frustrations when people want to push to try and notice its not possible
• Pending/Running Testruns (especially try) fails to whatever unrelated reasons and cause a Developer to spend time on issues that are not caused by her/his changes
• Reduce hammering on Sheriffs why a tree is closed and whats the eta etc

Steps to-do from the onduty Sheriff

1.) make clear that there is a outage and who is the current Sheriff with changing the topic of the #developers channel on IRC. Please add also the tracking bug and a possible eta time into the topic of #developers.

example:
Onduty-Sheriff: Tomcat - All Tree Closure - Database issue Bug 1234567 - no eta yet

2. Also post to #treestatus about the tree closure

3.) If the tree closures is expect to be a longer problem -> Post a short mail to the mozilla.dev.platform and dev-fxos <dev-fxos@lists.mozilla.org> newsgroup like https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/Kzd1es4KiYA - also like here the next sheriff could if the issue is fixed sent a all clear information.