Support/Goals/2011Q2/Rapid release workflow

Purpose

As the Firefox dev team is moving faster and faster, support has to keep up. When things get rolling in Q3 and Q4, there will be four versions of Firefox desktop (and likely mobile) going at once and we'll need to have a documented plan to keep on top of all of them.

Goal Definition

Using the Firefox 5 and Firefox 6 paths as testbeds, the goal is to develop a working checklist of action items to do for each Firefox release. We should be able to follow this list and use it as a guide to ensure nothing gets missed on the support side in the release process.

A secondary goal is to develop a workflow and process for managing the items on this checklist. As the true management complexities won't come to light until we're handling 4 releases at once, the goal for Q2 is simply to anticipate the problems and difficulties as the rapid release process scales up.

Project plan

• [DONE] Come up with a preliminary list of tasks to do based on Firefox 4 release experience
• [ON TRACK] Follow the above list as closely as possible for Firefox 5, documenting which meetings are needed to accomplish each item and how valuable they were
• [NEW] Pare down the checklist to a list of essential items with contact info on various teams for each one
• [NEW] Write new versions of the checklist to use in Firefox 6
• Re-iterate to improve as needed.