Releases/Thunderbird3.0a1/Post Mortem

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Dial In Info has the Conference Call controls, IRC Chat, and Telephone information.

What went well

• QA was quick!
  • Took 3 days, finding ~20 bugs.
    • A day for Tiger 10.4 and Vista SP1 smoketests.
    • A day for Linux and Leopard 10.5 smoketests.
    • A day for XP SP2 smoketests & selected BFTs.
    • No significant showstoppers found.
  • A substantial amount of stress on the QA folk(s), though nothing overwhelming.
  • Bugzilla flags have to be disabled post-a1-release - bug 434956

• No RC2 needed.
  • Alpha 1 was stable for an alpha.
  • Whatever unstable implementations of code had already been backed out.
  • Aug 2005 to end-April 2008 code -> 32 months since TB 2 codebase branched.

What could have gone better, and lessons learned

• Learned too late about branding subtleties.
  • bug 430762 - Start page for Alpha/Beta builds
  • bug 432188 - Swap Thunderbird to use www.mozillamessaging.com for in-product pages
  • bug 433630 - Need new icon for Shredder builds
  • bug 432756? - Prepare Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 1 start page
  • ...

• Notified IT too late about need for MoMo svn up on production site
  • bug 433593

• Issue found with QA testing download links
  • Linux bouncer links didn't work.
  • Pointed out and rectified immediately pre-official release.

• Not much community involvement for alpha 1 testday.
  • Have to reach out more to the community besides existing efforts.
  • nth10sd - My hands were tied on this; working on the testplan & almost nobody showing up to help QA testing.
    • Had been in over-drive to finish up QA alone in this regard, but not overwhelmingly stressful though.
  • We really should involve more of the community, even regulars popping by in the channel discussing certain areas of testing collaboratively would be helpful.
  • Alpha 2 QA plan?

• No significant numbers of Litmus testcases for Thunderbird 3 testday
  • Litmus admin was on leave, so the TB 2 testcases couldn't be copied in time.
    • TB2 testcases were used instead.
  • Now in progress - bug 431883

• Tree held closed for ~2 weeks.
  • Do we need to understand the implications of various branching/tagging methods better?

Attendees