The Case for Mozilla Triagers

While most Triage to date has been done by a dedicated community, with some assistance from QA and certain Devs, with the launch of Rapid Release, and the growth of Mozilla in the last 5 years, Triage has become a much larger, and broader task than first imagined. Having a reliable Triage team is necessary for both maintaining goodwill from End-users, and reliable quality Assurance.

Much as this task is too large to rely on solely a community based approach, it is likely too large for just one Full-Time Employee. While any amount of man power will be useful, the scope of tasks that an employee would have to face is large.

Full-Timer Responsibilities

Create and Maintain Triage documentation, wiki, newsgroup, etc.

Organize Bugdays.

Organize the existing Triage community.

Assist with creating and maintaining Triage Tools.

Introduce and mentor new members to the Community.

Evangelize Triage to Developers, Support, AMO, etc.

Triage Bugs in Firefox, Thunderbird, Core, Toolkit, and other components.

Facilitate meetings of the community.

Lead Triage workshops at work weeks, Summits, etc.

Direct and answer questions from the community.

Direct the community into areas of BMO that need Triaging.

Create metrics, analyzing the state of Triage, providing quarterly status updates and goals.

Many other smaller tasks and responsibilities.

At Least Two

I propose two different scenarios, both with what I see as the minimum Full-Timers that should be hired:

Scenario 1: Two Triagers are hired, both of which share Triage among the various products that need Triager coverage Full-time. The Triagers will share the responsibilities of documentation, bugdays, etc. I would imagine each Triager taking on 2-3 products, and creating their own micro-communities in that product(s).

Scenario 2: Two Triagers, one of which is hired as a Community Manager, and is responsible for documentation, managing the wiki, newsgroup, bugdays, etc. This Full-Timer can do triage as well, but that is not the main focus of the position. The second position would be a Full-Time Triager, who is not as responsible for managing the community, but focuses on Triaging in Mozilla Products Full-Time.

I see the ideal situation being a combination of 1 and 2, with a full-time Community Manager, and two full-time Triagers, but I realize that may not be possible at this time.