Release Management/New Hire Portal
From MozillaWiki
Hi and WELCOME to Release Management at Mozilla.
Below is a rough, yet fairly detailed, timeline of how we think your first week or so will look. If it appears packed, that's because it is. Our urgency for bringing you up to speed quickly has to do with trying to support a new upcoming product (B2G aka Firefox OS) while maintaining the high bar of quality we currently have for the 5 desktop channels and 4 mobile channels.
If any of the below doesn't make sense, please ask. Things might be abbreviated without explanation and we may have forgotten to include links. If you ever find yourself with downtime, please also check in with your manager/coworkers to see how you can help out.
Good luck, and welcome to Mozilla!
Contents
Monday
- Parking your car (in MV/SF)
- in MV is at 650 Castro Street, behind the building off Church Street, underneath what looks like a residential building. Here's the street view
- in SF is on Spears, in a garage to the right between Harrison and Embarcadero (Spears dead-ends there) - You have to pay $12 (Mozilla rate if you show your badge) at the end of the day when you pick up your car
- You can find floor plans for any of our offices, including desks/names at https://mana.mozilla.org/wiki/display/INTRANET/Office+Maps
- Make sure introductions are made with locally available Product Managers and QA Engineers - they will be people you'll work with closely
- At 11AM, you'll attend our weekly, public Mozilla meeting that is aired live on https://air.mozilla.org/ and near the end of the meeting you'll be introduced by your manager (or if unavailable, a coworker) and there will be much rejoicing
- There is a 12:10pm Firefox Team meeting after the weekly meeting in Warp Core when it is not followed by an internal, first Monday of the month meeting (dial into Firefox Team Vidyo room)
- Get on IRC (http://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC), register your nick (same as your email? not required, but that's a good default), and start idling in #relman, #release-drivers, #planning, #fx-team, #mobile, #b2g, and #developers on IRC (use /j #whatever)
- To message people directly, use /msg -- eg:
# you need to start the message in the initiating /msg call /msg lsblakk hi
- Install Firefox, Firefox Beta (rename on install to Firefox Beta), Firefox Aurora, Firefox ESR (rename to Firefox ESR on install), and Firefox Nightly
- Read up on and set up Firefox sync if you don't have it already - you'll want it on mobile for finding things quickly on the go
- Install Skype and Vidyo, log into both
- RelMan skype accounts: Alex Keybl (keysnbits), Lukas Blakk (lsblakk), Bhavana Bajaj (bhavana_bajaj)
- Set up your email and calendar in Mail/Calendar. If the computer comes with Mountain Lion, it'll have an iCal bug (set your default alerts in the preferences to 15min). This intranet page has other info like how to set up clients, other MoCo (Mozilla Corporation) internal stuff (partners, PTO, etc.). Not everything at Mozilla is public ;)
- Get a bugzilla account using your Mozilla email. Make sure to add [:ircnick] into your BZ name so that people can reply to your bug comments quickly over IRC (see http://cl.ly/image/0h2L3Y351M3d for example)
- File a Service Now request (Hardware->Mobile Phone) for an Android phone (currently we suggest the Galaxy S3) for testing and consider using it as your primary longterm. When you receive your phone, install Nightly/Aurora from FTP and Beta/Release from the Google Play Store. Feel free to go to the Desktop Support staff in your office to speed up the process, they often have hardware on hand
- Attend team triage from 3-5pm Pacific in the Release Coordination Vidyo room - don't worry we have three of these a week, things will start to make sense as you keep attending/participating
- Sign up for Yammer and take the rest of the day to finish setting up your computer and perusing Yammer & Planet Mozilla which aggregates blog posts by your 2000+ compatriots in the Mozilla Community
Tuesday
- Most people are in the office between 9-9:30, out by 6-6:30 in their timezones
- Working From Home (WFH) is also an option up to 2 times a week or so, but please hold off on that for a couple of weeks while you come up to speed
- Let the flood gates open first thing Tuesday - sign up for mailing lists:
- File a Bug asking to be added to the release-mgmt@mozilla.com distribution list
- You can check out the archives of dev.planning on the online newsgroup
- Subscribe to the RelMan calendar using the ICS link at the bottom
- Channel meeting at 10AM in the Release Coordination Vidyo room
- Introduce yourself (again, I know)
- Try to remember faces - these are our people, and we work with them on a daily basis
- Planning meeting at 11AM (MTV: WarpCore for physical and Vidyo room)
- Start setting up a personal/Mozilla blog - use a tag to distinguish your posts on Mozilla topics and set up an RSS or Atom feed for that tag's posts
- File a Bug to get syndicated on Planet Mozilla if that bug doesn't get resolved in the first week, get your manager/coworkers to prod the bug for you
- Set up Alex's handy tool on your Mac for opening bug numbers
- Also think about adding a keyboard shortcut for opening coworkers' names in the internal Mozilla Phonebook as it's super helpful with getting to know people in email
- Set up "Copy Better Link" for copying bug titles as HTML links, and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bugzillajs/ to make Bugzilla more readable/usable
- Set up your Firefox to open initially with multiple profiles as being able to do so is really helpful for reproducing issues
- In your default profile install the following addons:
- Tree Style Tabs for the amount of info we're parsing through at any one time you will find this add-on invaluable
- Bugzilla JS makes reading bugs much more user-friendly and provides several awesome improvements to navigating long bug lists
- Sqlite Manager helps with viewing local sqlite dbs we use for some tools
- Not required, but recommended: Adblock Plus, 1Password (buy & expense the app and get the mobile version too - keep all your passwords unique and on all your devices simultaneously)
- Try out some Bugzilla searching starting here:
- Figure out how to search for bugs that are tracking for a specific Firefox release that are unresolved and have the "qawanted" keyword attached
- File a Service Now request to get Windows/VMWare for your Mac
- If you're in MV ask Marcia to show you where the lab is (2nd floor) and spend some time trying to reproduce the bugs you found
- If you're able to, please comment in the bug
- For crashes, look at the associated crash comments on http://crash-stats.mozilla.com/
- Also look for bugs that have the regressionwindow-wanted keyword attached
- Use http://harthur.github.com/mozregression/ to help find a regression window.
- Finish out your day with the 5PM B2G meeting (location is always TBD)
Wednesday
- You should already be idling in #mobile
- Attend the mobile meeting in the morning at 9:30AM in WarpCore (starting to see a trend here?)
- Add an agenda item to the meeting introducing yourself to the mobile team
- Sign up for more mailing lists:
- Platform meeting at 11AM in the Product Coordination Vidyo room
- If you got syndicated on Mozilla Planet, great, get your first blog post up introducing yourself to the community/company
- Things to include may be where you're coming from, why you're excited about Mozilla, and something you do outside of work
- Start learning HG (Mercurial)
- Join RelMan team for triage (currently 12-2pm) where we burn through our tracking priorities list
- You will learn about FLAGS:
- tracking
- status
- approval
- keywords
- Try to start soaking your teammate's intuition (from your interview we know it's already good), next week you'll start shadowing branch triage and making recommendations
Thursday
- Start familiarizing yourself with the Bugzilla/LDAP API
- See bztools for our current scripts & tools we automate tracking reminders with
- Bugzilla:REST_API docs are here
- Help with setting up the Channel meeting notes (meeting it at 2pm)
- Create an account on wiki.mozilla.org
- Take a look at the wiki markup info if you need any tips
- Learn about etherpad.mozilla.org and its wonderful uses:
- http://etherpal.org/ is a great tool for keeping track of your etherpads
- http://htmlpad.org/ makes web pages based on markup in an etherpad - dynamic, version controlled, collaborative editing got itself a front end :)
- Channel meeting at 2:00 PM in the Release Coordination Vidyo room
- Read up on the ESR FAQ, ESR proposal, landing process, and the recent dev-planning post
- Join ESR security triage at 4PM along with the security team in the Release Coordination Vidyo room
Friday
- Start thinking about how you'd like to filter your email because you will get a lot of it and need to see it all
- Make sure you hilight anything that is directly TO you
- Talk to your teammates to learn what colouring/filtering they use
- Set up your bugmail filters to move email to a separate folder except the important stuff.
- Set up a 30/60min meeting time with joduinn (if he has the time) or bhearsum for next week to get a run down of Release Engineering (RelEng)
- Similarly, set up a time with Marcia, Juan, or Anthony for next week to get a run down of the QA systems and test coverage
- Finish up tasks from earlier in the week, if any are still outstanding
- Watch over a teammate's shoulder as they edit product-details to update the website links, l10n info, and SUMO (support) tools for a Beta release
- Check out https://input.mozilla.com/, take a look at negative feedback for the upcoming Firefox version, if you see any patterns for possibly critical issues, consider filing a bug
- Join team triage again from 3-5pm Pacific in the Release Coordination Vidyo room
Over the next couple of months
- Keep up with your new inbox mail, but you're likely not on the critical path for anything yet.
- Attend all of the same meetings from last week, even if they're not listed below.
- Start idling in the #crashkill IRC channel - this is your one stop shop for all things stability related.
- Join crashkill team meeting on Mondays at 10am Pacific in the Stability Vidyo room
- After that meeting, check out crash-stats with the context you've now garnered
- Take a look at linked crash bugs, familiarize yourself with the to few on each FF version
- Read up on blocklisting add-ons/plugins (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting)
How we divide tasks
Generally we meet at least 3 times per week over triage and work through our queries but we also have been trying to have one person be point on each release so that we're swapping out being in the 'hot seat'. For example at the time of writing this: Alex is driving FF19 on Beta and to being released, Lukas is driving FF20 while it's on Aurora, and Bhavana will be doing FF21 which is currently on nightly/trunk. What this means is that the person who is on the next Aurora (21) is able to work more on other tasks for improving the goals of Release Management that are outside of tracking & driving a particular release. This can mean working on stability, custom platforms, tracking new feature work that is coming, and working on tools that continue to automate some of the more mundane or paper cut aspects of our work.
