Compatibility/Meetings/2021-01-19

• Web Compatibility Meeting Meeting - 2021-01-19
• Minutes: Previous 2021-01-05

Minutes

Scribed by Dennis

OKR 2021Q1 (karl)

https://github.com/mozilla/webcompat-team-okrs/projects/12 This is the place to add OKRs. Feel free to convert some of your projects in multiple cards if needed. Think atomic if it helps.

• Karl: I would like to change the way we do OKRs. If there are work items you want to work on, just create cards. Some large ideas can be spread over multiple cards. Prioritize them yourself, be mindful that a quarter is short. :) The goal is not to do all the things, the goal is to be reasonable. I want everyone to take ownership over the team's OKRs.
• Karl: Please keep commenting on the cards while you're working to share updates, it will help other people to learn and ask more. Especially during meetings, this could be more productive than going through all the cards all the time. I can help with creating agenda items for things I find interesting.

Triage Basketball (Cipri)

Cipri has news. :basketball:

• Cipri: This will be my last meeting. I'll join another project at Feb 1st. We have a Romanian saying "The opportuinity-train does not stop at the same station twice during one lifetime". You're all awesome, keep doing what you do.
• Dennis: <3
• Karl: Thank you for all your work! Oana told me that we'll get backfill soon.
• Oana: They've been training in the background. Raul (TODO: Check name. :)) will join Feb 1st.
• Tom: You've done great work!

PSA: regarding the Fx86 webcompat addon release (tom)

Time is running out to nominate what site-compat additions/removals we wish to make for Firefox 86! Please let me know if we're missing anything on the relevant bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1686065

• Tom: Firefox 86 is coming up soon, I'll be starting building the site intervention patches soon. If you have not nominated things for the cycle yet, now is your time!
• Karl: Do you think we don't do enough?
• Tom: Difficult to say. It's time we could be spending on other diagnosis work and stuff, I'm 50/50 on that. Am concerned it's going to increase churn, especially since all site interventions need QA verifications etc.
• Tom: If we think adding more simple site patches is a good idea, raise your opinions.

Automated testing for site interventions (webcompat)

• Karl: Do you think automated test validation could work?
• Tom: If we have something in automation, James would be a good Point of Contact here. We could put the extra effort in.
• Karl: Thinking if Oana and Raul would be interested in writing test cases.
• James: How do we test the patches and that it's working. We could find something more efficient. For cases where you need to interact with the site, GeckoDriver might be a way to go. There might be simpler solutions for some cases. Can't remember what Opera was doing, I didn't work on that.
• Oana: If we have some examples of how it's done, we can probably figure it out.
• Karl: It shouldn't be too hard to write new testcases.
• James: There is an IDE for creating tests, but I'm not sure how well that works. Might work. They exists, it's worth trying.
• Tom: It would probably be best for QA to tell the person implementing the sitepatch how to test that.
• James: We have the concept of timed tasks on taskcluster, so we could use that. Or as a tier 3 test. We can access remote sites in the tests if we want to.
• Dennis: please include me on any meetings about it. There is a bit of prior work about it.
• Tom: If we have ideas, we should collect them somewhere and have a discussion on those things!
• Karl: Even if we're starting simple, if Oana could start a script that would run tests and help her do the annoying parts of her work, if she's interested.
• [TODO] Tom to collect ideas and coordinate communications about automated t before esting. :)

Discussion about Webcompat (karl)

Because catastrophe scenario helps to think on the edge. Let's imagine the consequences of Mozilla without the webcompat team. This is a way to clearly outlines where the work matters and where the work doesn't matter. And that would make a stronger case to define our work items.

• Karl: The world is doomed, and so is the web. I like to think about things like "If we'd get rid of WebCompat, would Firefox survive/is it nececssary?". If we think that WebCompat is super important for Firefox, how to we communicate that.
• Dennis: Compatibility is important. We need to be better at communicating about the importance of diagnosis. Probably compatibility is thought in some circles more in terms of implementation gaps in between browsers (and specs).
• James: It's very easy to measure when we don't have a thing that Chrome does. That produces a very nice graph, and it's easy to understand. A question I have is: do we have any way of knowing that the site issues we're experiencing are becoming more or less critical? Do we have any sense if we're seeing more issues on bigger sites as time goes on?
• Karl: We have some signals, but it's very hard to measure. My impression is that we have fixed a lot of the "simple" issues in the last couple of years. The more we dive into WebCompat, the harder the issues become to resolve. `innerText` is one high-profile example, it created a lot of WebCompat issues. A very important piece of our work has inpact for users, but don't neccessarily affect spec-metrics. We sometimes think too much about the people in Web Platform, but not enough about UX and Product people.
• Karl: I don't think we see more issues on bigger issues. We see certain areas where people create more WebCompat issues, because they don't test on Firefox or just use Chrome'isms in their application. There are some issues that don't get addressed at all, because they're not immediately visible to the "Western Market", like issues with `<marquee>` tags on Indian sites, which is a huge issue, but nobody is using that tag in the "Western World". That's a UX issue, not an impelmentation gap or something.
• Karl: And yes, we're bad at communicating. I'm planning to do more, like blog posts etc. Making noise in the community.
• Tom: We could also work on blog post/knowledge bases as a team, or collect information (a short summary of the issue) to refer back to it later and create a blog post.
• Karl: Yeah, good idea. I frequently reference Mike's blog post about Fastclick whenever I see a Fastclick issue. That's useful. I want to create a blog post about scrolling differences, for example.
• Tom: A regular "State of WebCompat" blog post with a summary over a fixed, regular timespan could also be useful. If we could gather the details of our work as a team, that work would be easier. Could also help us cross-reference issues during diagnosis. It's also a good idea to look at `webcompat?` flags at bugzilla.
• Karl: Proposal: If you diagnose something and you think it's interesting, ping me on Matrix with a link to the bug, I'll commit to collect and publish them.
• Tom: Could also be useful for triage e.g. when we get a lot of reports that a site doesn't work, but we can't login or whatever.
• Ksenia/Karl: Fx Site Compat was super useful, but also a giant amount of work.

Team Brown Bag (karl)

Do you want to share what you learn about something/technology to the rest of the team? A short talk on a topic. Once a month. Useless?

• Karl: Another idea! Would people be intersted at giving a short presentation about something they're working on. Or side projects. Or something else interested they'd be interested in introducing to the team.
• James: Half of the teams I've been on did this, and the half-life of those ideas is low. Most people have one idea, they present it, and then it dies. Not saying that this is bad, but adding my experience. :)
• Dennis: Just add your ideas to the team meeting agenda if you have something!
• Karl: We often have a lot of time in the meeting. Don't be afraid to add an agenda item if you have something to share!

FYI: gathering feedback on things we'd like fixed for devtools for our needs (tom)

One of my wishlist items is to figure out which papercuts and other bugs in the devtools would save us diagnosis time and effort. This can include other tooling, like the Testcase Reducer, but I'd like to focus mostly on which kinds of bugs we would like fixed in the devtools. That way we can decide whether we can realistically fix some of those bugs ourselves, or need help, and can make an argument one way or the other. Let's find a time when anyone interested in this discussion can meet for a video call and hammer through our wishlists for devtools bugs.

• karl: This is the previous list of meta bugs, it would be good to review it. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1493094
• karl: I have started a discussion with Jan Honza and Maire Reavy to understand how we should better solve this.
• karl: Let's meet ASAP, and create a priority list of bugs and open new ones when necessary.
• Tom: In the planning doc/wishlist, I added some ideas already.
• Karl: I contacted some people working on DevTools. Honza is interested in a new list of bugs that are important to us, triaging the existing metabug, prioritizing them, ... would be helpful. DevTools will have more time when the Fission work is done.
• Tom: Treat this as a wishlist, we can prioritize/filter at a later point.
• [TODO] Everyone to think about their personal most important DevTools papercuts/wishlist items and collect those things, so we can talk to the DevTools team to fix them. Open new bugs if there is not one already. Send those ide before as to Tom.

FYI: 2021H1 Ideas (karl)

Let's keep this around so we have a reference. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w3_AU4ZYJJLSkqOW5j_6K49JxmutEsxcpsiwHXz8Tbw/edit?usp=sharing

Two Minutes ( 👹 )

This is the summary of what you have done during the last two weeks. * Feel free to add your own 2 minutes. * Keep it short. * Feel free to add your name if you think you need to share something.

• Cipri: Moderation/Triage, Interventions & Overrides re-check, Skiing
• Dennis: Diagnosis, Outreach (with surprisingly high success rates), helping others figuring out what's broken (aka clearing my needinfo queue); yelling at clouds and being angry at the snow.
• James: Wrote something about wpt. Working on testharness.js debugging experience. Trying to stay sane with homeschooling etc.
• Karl: Management means Google Docs. And Google Docs suck for many things. :) I have been doing a bit of webcompat.com stuff. That was refreshing. btw End of January was the last time, we met.
• Kate:
• Ksenia: Looking through ML handover docs, diagnosis, trying out bugzilla-to-webcompat extension
• Guillaume:
• Oana: Moderation/Triage, Interventions & Overrides re-check, Bugzilla verification. Hiking in the snow.
• Tom: finally feel like I'm back from depression; the site diagnosis juices have been flowing well, and I've finally managed to wrangle some help from the ETP team to figure out the remaining blockers for shims... now to "git 'er dun" (or however that phrase goes). Also: my dog is once again eager to go on walks, so I don't have to worry about her mood, either (yay!)

PTO / Travel ( 👹 )

(no more travel until the end of 2020… probably) Coming holidays across the world https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/