Contribute/Coding/Onboarding

The purpose of this document is to share the planning and progress of a unified Mozilla code-contributor onboarding tool, intended to replace both WhatCanIDoForMozilla and Bugs Ahoy.

The goal of this project is to help participants get from "interested in contributing" to "working on a bug" in a single browsing session.

Proposed project milestones are as follows:

Research

• Evaluate stakeholders & existing tools. What have we got on the shelf that we can repurpose, if anything. Who wants what from this.
• Coordination with colleagues, stakeholders (Emma Irwin in education, others?)
• Partnering with UW researchers and coordinating with Metrics for process instrumentation.

Deliverables are:

• narrowly-described requirements (below)
• reasonable consensus among interested parties
• crisp description of metrics as aligned with Moz topline goals.

Requirements:

• The project requirements are to deliver a single site that takes interested contributors from "I have a computer and am interested in contributing" to "I am set up to develop Firefox or fxA and interact with the community." In outcome terms, this means:
  • A working toolchain on the big 3 platforms: (PC, Mac, Linux)
  • A working checkout of the tree.
  • An IRC client. joined to #Introduction
  • A Bugzilla account.
  • An optional Mozillians account.
  • Finally, user is presented with a small set of issues to choose from.

Notes:

• Metrics, Education (Emma Irwin) and UW researchers will be involved in measuring user progress to track effectiveness.
• FxOS will not be a part of a first-iteration deliverable because of developer environment setup complexity. Reducing this complexity is one of the FxOS team's goals for the near future (Q1?) and we'll be glad for their involvement.
• This is aligned with both the Firefox and Participation team's top-line goals to drive involvement and community growth around our technical offerings. KPIs for those groups are TBD, but I've reached out to Rosana Ardila and David Tenser to seek their input.

Expected completion: January 20th. Actual completion: February 4th (published Feb 9th; oversight on my part sorry -mhoye) Status: Complete modulo KPI-related metrics.

Wire frames and workflow design

• User flows through the process, making sure users can get from A to B to shipping.
• Hallway testing & ux consultation (Madhava, Bwinton, others.)
• community consultation (CBT, FX-Team, others)

Deliverables are:

• complete wireframes and walkthrough user stories.

Expected completion: 1st week of February Status: Wireframes are <a href="http://bespokeio.com/moz/"> here, user stories ongoing.

Implementation

• Working mockup
• User/usecase acceptance trials
• Metrics integration throughout
• If successful, notify IT of upcoming intent to deploy and end of quarter, coordinate about security analysis, hosting

Deliverables are:

• Working-but-ugly tool you can walk all the way through.
• Generates metrics.

Expected completion: 4th week of February Status: In progress - expected delivery March 10

Polish & Delivery

• UX and graphic-design work here. Branding approval. Need the nod from Mart3ll, Madhava (All of GMC?) to ship.
• Coordination with and/or validation by
  • IT (Ops & Security)
  • Branding

Deliverables:

• Project hosted and running on a Mozilla-domain, public facing server. (Pull requests sent to Bedrock, and pushed to site.)
• Documentation and processes updated to reflect new tools.
• Announced on Planet, at weekly Project meeting.

Expected completion: End March (was 3rd week March) Status: Not yet started

Things that are explicitly out of scope

• Localization. V1 ships EN-US only, i18n is Q2+
• Non-Firefox(D,A,OS) participation in Mozilla codebase.

While it should be possible to include these at a later date, they won't ship in Q1.

If you have any questions or additions to make, please contact Mike Hoye - mhoye at mozilla.com - or ask mhoye directly on IRC.