MDN/Development Process

Product Planning

During product planning meetings we set product milestones. We discuss milestone goals & objectives - esp. release dates & success metrics. Product planning meetings set the backlog of milestones.

• Schedule - Bi-weekly Wednesdays @ 10am PST, 15-60m
• Attendees - All MDN Stakeholders: Engagement+, Product+, Dev+, Legal?, QA?, IT?
• Agenda
  • Carry-over any outstanding milestones
  • Introduce new milestones
• Output
  • basecamp milestones & tasks
  • accurate bugzilla milestones

Dev Planning

• Weekly, 15-60m
• Product
• Developers
• QA
• IT (optional)

Agenda

• Retro
  • Celebrate all code pushes & give kudos
  • Look back at the last "sprint" - what worked, what didn't, and what should we improve?
• Triage & Planning
  • Developers review milestones' bug backlog with Product and adjust according to developer input - implementation details, resources, risk, effort, etc.
  • Triage new bugs and set milestones
• Roadmap
  • Briefly (5m) discuss upcoming non-immediate work so no-one is surprised by anything.

Output

Sprint backlog in the form of dev + product-approved bugzilla bugs for immediately active milestone(s)

Standup

Standup is a very short (5-10m) daily meeting to make sure everyone is on the same page.

• Schedule - Daily @ 10am PST, 5-10m
• Attendees - Developers & Product
• Agenda - Round-robin:
  • What I did yesterday.
  • What I'm doing today.
  • Blockers, if any.
• Output - warm fuzzies

Bugs

Components

See MDN/QA/Filing Bugs

Status Flow

Bugs should typically flow thru the team:

• Product & QA & Dev
  • (Unconfirmed) -> New
• Dev
  • New -> Assigned -> Resolved:Fixed
• QA
  • Resolved:Fixed -> Reopened (staging problem)
  • Resolved:Fixed -> Verified:Fixed
  • Verified:Fixed -> Reopened (production problem)
  • Verified:Fixed -> Closed

Severity

• Blocker - cannot push milestone without fixing this bug
  • (e.g., security, total loss of functionality)
• Critical - only okay to push Blockers in front of this bug
  • (e.g., major function broken but workaround in place)
• Major - this bug is part of the major focus of the milestone
  • (e.g., Demo Studio for 0.9.3)
• Normal, etc. - Nice-to-have, work on between other bugs
  • (e.g., style changes, annoyances)