MozCampEU2012/Firefox Stability Programs

DRAFT

Title of Session (should also be the title of your Wiki page): Firefox Stability Programs Subtitle: How we use crash statistics, telemetry, and other measures to improve the stability of Firefox and 3rd-party software

Facilitator(s): Benjamin Smedberg (bsmedberg) and Robert Kaiser (kairo)

Are you paid or volunteer staff?: paid

Area of Contribution (Team Name): bsmedberg: Plugin and Stability and Such; kairo: Crashkill and crash statistics

How are you currently involved with the community?: bsmedberg: module owner of XPCOM and embedding, peers of build config, bootstrap and profile management, and RDF, former l10n coordinator and engineer; kairo: crashkill program manager, former German localizer, former seamonkey product driver.

Location of Work (where do you reside?): bsmedberg: Pennsylvania, US; kairo: Austria, Europe

Talk Length (please choose between 30, 60, 90, 120 minutes): 60 minutes

Summary: We use metrics from crashes and telemetry, as well as support, feedback, and external sources, to measure the stability of the Firefox product. This talk will explain the various elements of the stability/crashkill program:

• how crash statistics provide an overall picture of stability;
• how engineers use specific crash information to fix bugs;
• how Mozilla provides feedback to other vendors such as plugin and extension authors about problems with their products
• how features such as Telemetry are being used to provide additional stability metrics on jank and hangs;
• how new features such as the metrics data ping may provide additional statistical information on stability.

How your session furthers the MozCamp Goals (https://wiki.mozilla.org/MozCampEU2012/Tracks):

• Educate community leaders in the EU community about how the stability programs work and discuss with them stability programs and other technical barriers to ongoing product adoption.
• Build the volunteer engineering and metrics community around crash and stability.

Expected Outcome or Deliverable:

• General education and community understanding
• Recruit at least one new volunteer to aid with stability engineering, and one new volunteer to aid with stability metrics.

Desired Audience Type or Skill-set:

• This talk will be directed toward a moderately technical audience who may or may not have coding skill or statistical knowledge.

Equipment Needs (Video projector already included): No additional equipment needed

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To Be Completed by the Audience-

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