Electrolysis/Firefox/PhaseOne

Goals

• Phase 1 is a very focused effort to get Firefox up and running with Electrolysis as quickly as possible.

Usage Scenarios

• Launch Firefox and have it show Gmail.

Status

• We have put together a strawman proposal. It's still under review and discussion.

Strategy

The approach here is similar to the path the mobile project took. We would simply turn on Electrolysis and hack out and around everything we have to until we get to something that works. We can then have a better inventory of what will break and can use that work as a basis for planning the subsequent phases. This is a critical first step in enabling us to plan the rest of the project as well as set the stage for parallelizing work and getting the rest of the team involved. How long this takes will also be informative.

It's helpful to spell out the non-goals here to keep the scope as narrow as possible. We would not attempt to have a functional browser and UI in any form ie: The Gmail page would just appear and you wouldn't even try and navigate via a URL. There are lots things we may have to remove to get this working. Maybe add ons don't work - get rid of them and that's ok. We are also not trying to make everything clean architecturally. This will come in the next phase. It's all about the shortest path to getting something running.

Assumptions

We are making a few other assumptions...

• No project branch or collaboration space is required - this can be done locally on a dev machine.
• We can identify the resources to work on this.
• This initiative can start relatively soon - prior to shipping Firefox 4.

Team

The plan is to keep this phase really small with a core team working on getting the thing up and running and some set of go-to resources for support.

Core team:

• It would be best to have a team of probably 2 people focused on this.
• Due to the nature of the task it makes sense to have them located in MV so they are in close proximity to the platform team.
• 1 junior person - knows the code, resourceful, can get stuff done. This will probably be the primary resource on the project. We expect almost 100% of their time on this.
• 1 senior person - provide guidance, help us stay focused. Someone to spend some predictable amount of time on the project.
• Ideally we want an individual(s) we think we can largely pull-off the Firefox 4 work and will stay focused on the goal without the temptation to make it bigger than it needs to be. We realize the senior resource may have to get pulled into other commitments.

Supporting team:

• There will have to be a couple of people, namely on the platform team, that will be available as points to help the core team when they run into problems.

Time Frame

We have no idea how long it will take.

Tracking

• Since this phase is all about getting something up and running in a very self-contained environment, the most efficient way to handle this is as SCRUM-style project.
• Project management goals...
  • Communicating daily with the core team (and others as needed) - regular SCRUM type meeting is ideal (5 min).
  • Keep track of what is going well, what is not going well and be able to summarize that for others regularly - lists, wiki etc.
  • Adding stuff to the running list of "big questions".
  • Help the core team stay focused and not get pulled into other stuff. Clearly there is some common sense involved here because issues may arise with the Firefox 4 end-game that we can't predict.
  • Making sure we get the attention we need from the supporting resources since they will be juggling a number of priorities.
• Non project management goals
  • Tell anybody how far we are from the finish line.

Next Actions

• Setup a bunch of wiki pages detailing this proposal (DONE).
• Get consensus on this plan.
• Identify the core team and supporting team resources.
• Pick a start date to get moving.