Firefox/Channels/Postmortem/44

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Firefox 44 Post-mortem

• [lmandel] Postmortem on a beta regression (bug 1240559) from Mike Conley on firefox-dev
  • https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2016-January/003836.html

• Soccoro issues during 44 cycle
  • 1 week outage during the xmas week.
  • another outage within 48 hrs of going live (critical window for us) :(
  • Seems to be a lack of confidence in the current stability data and rate - specifically apparent for Android. We need to figure out what is needed so that we all trust the crash data.
  • [Action item]: Ritu to discuss with Lonnen
  • [Action item]: Kevin/KaiRo/Ritu to help reconcile Fennec crash rate and help relman understand how to self-serve that data while driving a release.

• NSS Updates
  • We need to communicate a timeline to NSS devs that for a Beta cycle we need fixes by Beta3/4 and only extremely critical fixes after that.
  • [syl] We discussed with the NSS team and we are probably going to treat NSS changes just like any other Firefox changes
  • [lmandel] potentially move NSS in-tree
  • [Action item]: Sylvestre to let us know when this can be put into place.

• Hotfix required for bug 1242176 to address password lost, discovered during throttling period
  • We need to improve the hotfix situation. Maybe force the hotfix ping before the update / after
  • Hotfix is not the right mechanism when we need to gaurantee delivery of a fix before an update as we needed with the places db in 44
  • We should spec out a project for hotfix improvements
    • support for delivering multiple payloads concurrently
    • gauranteed delivery - force application of hotfix before applying an update
    • improve data about uptake - can/should we do this with Telemetry?
  • [Action item]: Ritu to communicate these items on hotfix improvements to hotfix team.

• Missed uplift of graphics crash fix in bug 1222171 that eventually ended up as a ride-along in 44.0.1 (top-crasher)

• Fennec 44 adjust not working.
  • [Action item]: Getting adjust ping in Beta, Aurora, Nightly so we can catch these issues before we go live.
    • Beta - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1248066
    • Aurora / Nightly - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1248764

• Fennec spent most ofthe beta cycle chasing the crash rate. Disabling the dynamic tilecache made the biggest difference. Holidays did not help here ~10days of people on pto.
  • [syl] The new schedule is going to address the holiday issue. No more work during holidays \o/
  • Good team work finding and fixing issues to improve Fennec stability during late Beta 44 cycle.

• Cookiegate https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1244505#c21
  • [syl] we had some concerns initially ...
  • [syl] Hard to address as webdevs are using the web in different ways
  • In future, we should consider using telemetry data to understand what sort of an impact this sort of change to bring about

• [lmandel] We spent a lot of time during the cycle trying to figure out whether we should slip, skip, or release on time. A big part of this time was spent because we don't have a mitigation plan or clear criteria in place. We have projects underway to develop these. I think the cycle reinforces the need for this work.
  • [Action item]: RelMan working on a criteria