User:Morgamic/AMO

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Abstract

Discussion about addons.mozilla.org. Topics to be covered are usability, functionality, security, scalability and marketing.

Backdrop and State of AMO

• It works
• It doesn't work very well
• Still needs to be rewritten
• It needs to be simplified

Recent Work

• Maintenance script
• New template
• Versioning hell

Where Do We Go From Here?

Needed Features and Changes

• Trust metrics - taking a different look at how we review add-ons.
• Locale support - where is it? How do we take care of this?
• Version nightmares - what versioning standard should we enforce / agree on?
• Catering to our users - how can we improve the application to work for Mom and Dad? (input from Beltzner?)

Who is Going to Do All of This?

• Existing volunteers
  • Testing, QA
  • Bugzilla management
  • FAQ and support
• Contractors and MoCo
  • Drive development and priorities
  • Set requirements, standards, timeline and stick to them

Human Resources -- why do we need a change?

Since April, the project has been in the hands of volunteers without a dirving force behind the project. Some of the challeneges we've faced are:

• distributed volunteer base
• lots of inexperience programmers
• lack of testing for submitted patches (leads to a -)
• some developers want to use php5
• not enough time to organize all incoming requests
• not enough time to satisfy all requirements from all groups
  • Sysadmins
  • Marketing
  • Product management
  • Add-on developer community
  • AMO site developer community
  • AMO users
  • Mozilla Security
  • Other parties

What Additional Resources Do We Need?

My conclusion (My == morgamic) is that the project suffers from a lack of organization that needs to be fixed by more involvement on behalf of MoCo. I would like to see the hiring/contracting of some key players that have been lacking over the course of the last year:

• A project manager to help relieve the pressure developers feel from all angles
• A project lead to set reasonable requirements and standards (this is morgamic, pretty much)
• A developer core, probably contractors, that is paid -- and held accountable for progress of a structured rewrite

Additional resources would help set aside much-needed development time and organization of the project that has served as a major obstacle to progress in the past year.

The bottom line is we tried to get everything done with a volunteer developer base, but that fell through because of lack of resources -- and we can't afford to keep things going the way they are.

What's Up With v2.0?

• Public side is almost done but... a lot has happened since the summer and we should get our bearing.
  • Migration to PHP5
  • Adoption of a broader framework, dropping Smarty and PEAR?
  • Database redesign a necessity given other discussed changes
• AMO 1.5?
  • Release current v2.0 code as a new public-facing version of AMO that is simplified and more reliable.
  • After this is released, refocus efforts on an improved rewrite/refactoring.