Releases/Thunderbird 3.0b2/Post Mortem

Yes, this is currently a post mortem before the patient has passed.

Post Mortem for the Thunderbird release of 3.0b2

What could have gone better, and lessons learned

Leading up to the release

• In reference to the Development Page page.
  • Weekly milestones are necessary
    • Create a milestone for every week in release cycle
    • Name milestones: ${REL}week${NUM} ex: b2week1, b2week2, etc
    • Plan landing of items (features/bugs) in each week
    • Set status whiteboard of bugs with milestone names (makes them searchable)
    • Work with Q/A to plan sessions testing milestone one week after it lands
    • Create search links for each week milestone
  • Release dates should have indicator of strength
    • Something like keywords strong, weak, or likely to slip to communicate how solid the dates are at this point
• should release process planning meeting be removed from 3.0b2? (hasn't been done for last 2 releases) Should it simply be replaced with references to prior releases' postmortems?

QA

• Need to avoid mixing Litmus runs and Test Days - as it confuses people. This should be fixed with better communication (see 2.1 above).
• Need to run upgrade from previous version tests to avoid things like bug 480556.

Anything else

• need to firm up crash-stats.m.c update step, seems to be insufficient to ask for adding the release and next development release. ref bug 480728 MTBF missing Thunderbird 3.0b2 milestone, and development 3.0b3pre & 3.1a1pre // 3.0b2 topcrash no results