User:Morgamic/AMO
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.