Onboarding process in the Release Management team

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< Release Management
Revision as of 20:21, 7 October 2019 by Ritu Kothari (talk | contribs) (→‎IRC: Updating a few IRC channels)
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Welcome to Release Management! Here is a list of accounts to set up, tools to check out, and any other details we can think of to help you start getting yourself set up.

Account Permissions

You'll want to make sure you have the necessary permissions to do the following and some will take longer than others to achieve so start early.

Bugzilla

  • Create a Bugzilla account.
  • File a bug to request for your bugzilla account to be added to the mozilla-next-drivers and mozilla-stable-branch-drivers groups in order to set tracking flags (eg: bug 962151). Make sure you also have the edit-bugs and canconfirm permissions.
  • You can see security sensitive bugs if someone CCs you into the bug, or if you eventually join the security group list. Security permission comes later.

Internal Documentation

VPN

Configure your system to access to the Mozilla VPN in order to get access to internal tools like Ship-It.

Documentation:

Ship It

Ship It is available behind our VPN, note that you will need to use Mozilla DNS servers to resolve the url.

File a bug (Infrastructure & Operations::Infrastructure:LDAP) to be added to the shipit and vpn_shipit groups. Example: bug 1469544

Once you are using the Mozilla VPN, you can access the application and use your LDAP account to log in.

Ubuntu Snaps

We build and publish a Firefox Ubuntu snap package ourselves.

Release Engineering has some documentation on how we create and push snaps.

The Firefox Snaps Dashboard to have a Ubuntu One developer account and this account to be associated with your @mozilla.com email address. Your Ubuntu One account should have 2FA activated (Ubuntu Specific instructions).

Once you have set up your Ubuntu One account and registered as a developer on Snapcraft with this account, ask Release Engineering (currently specifically Johan Lorenzo) to send you an invite to manage Firefox snaps. The Snap uploading process was defined in bug 1467261.

Release Notes

Request admin access to https://nucleus.mozilla.org by filing two bugs.

First, one to get the Nucleus site added to your SSO account in Infrastructure & Operations::Infrastructure: SSO, Example: bug 1351680.

The second bug is to be added as admin in the Web App Websites::Nucleus. Example: bug 1135186

Google Play Console

Ask your manager to add you.

Balrog

TBD

Socorro (crash-stats)

TBD

Trello

Trello is used to track the shipping of Firefox features in the Firefox Trello Board. Ask Erin Lancaster (elan on IRC) for access.

Each release has its own column listing the features planned for that specific version. Pro tip: subscribe to a column notification to receive updates given to all the cards in that column.

Our team also has a Trello board but we currently do not use it.

Github

Some of our tools are developped on Github, some Firefox features are also developped on Github and many teams use Github for development but also documentation, blogging, project management…

Please note that although you can use Github to file bugs in Bugzilla, you should not use it as your work account because Github accounts on bugzilla can't access security and internal bugs.

Repositories

PTO calendar

Ask your manager to give you access to the Release Management PTO calendar where all release managers indicate when they are on PTO.

Other

Communication Channels

Release Calendar

This page describes our release schedule: Firefox Release Calendar. You should add these to your regular Google calender so you can easily see the state of any release.

E-Mail

Note that some of these mailing lists need approval from an administrator.

Our team lists

  • release-mgmt-team@mozilla.com: General discussions for the whole team
  • release-mgmt@mozilla.com: Discussions about releases, schedule…
  • release-mgmt-analysis@mozilla.com: Discussions about code coverage, machine learning/Artificial Intelligence, static analysis…

Other useful lists You'll need to manually subscribe to:

These are available as nntp newsgroups, Google groups, and mailing(1), lists(2).

Websites

IRC

IRC is our traditionnal chatting tool, we run our own server (irc.mozilla.org) with a thousand specialized chat rooms. Some people prefer Slack, other IRC so we have chatroom in both.

  • airmozilla - back channel for public broadcasts
  • developers - monitor check-ins and speak with devs
  • fx-team - good place to speak with desktop team
  • mobile - good place to speak with mobile devs
  • moco [access_key is here [1]]
  • planning - back channel for product coordination meeting, good place to speak with broader product team
  • pm - Project management
  • release-drivers - release related discussions
  • releng - releng team channel
  • releaseduty - releng team's releaseduty channel
  • release-mgmt - our team channel, needs a password, ask relman team.
  • security (ask for channel key) - the security team's channel
  • qa - QE team channel
  • www - for speaking with the mozilla.org team in case a push breaks or otherwise doesn't work
  • http://chatzilla.hacksrus.com/faq/#connect

Many folks uses IRC Cloud as Mozilla as an instance (request an account in Service Now), others run a BNC (an IRC bouncer) (e.g. znc) and/or irssi under screen to get continuous view of traffic.

See below for a local pastebin install, so you don't paste huge amounts in channel.

Slack

Mozilla Slack, you can login with sso.

  • release-drivers - release related discussions
  • qa-coordination - QE team channel
  • release-coordination - Cross functional coordination room during a release
  • triage-and-tracking - All things bugzilla
  • release-notes - coordination with release notes stakeholders, marketing and writers
  • moco - backchannel for meetings
  • firefox - firefox development room

Meetings

As a release manager, you will need to attend recurrent meetings, here is the list:

Tuesday:

  • 1st Channel meeting
  • Feature Deep Dive meeting

Wednesday

  • Cross Functionnal meeting

Thursday

  • 2nd Channel meeting
  • Our Team meeting

Ask your manager and colleagues to invite you to these meetings.

EtherPad

EtherPad is a great tool for dynamic collaboration during meetings, brainstorming, or other times when you need to collaborate:

Pastebin

There's a local pastebin instance at https://pastebin.mozilla.org/, so you don't need to paste multi-lines into a channel. Use this handy helper script to pipe to pastebin from terminal. 

   it creates a new page from stdin, and outputs the url to stdout
   an argument will be interpretted as the syntax highlighting format to use
   sample usage: hg diff | pastebin python | pbcopy (last part mac specific)
   set & export PASTEBIN_NAME if you don't want to post as anonymous.

Planet

Add a bug similar to bug 605709 to get your blog syndicated on https://planet.mozilla.org. You can choose to send every post, or create a feed for a custom tag (eg: 'mozilla'). Having your blog syndicated to planet is a great channel for announcing new features (along with tweeting and posting to newsgroups).

Software

Firefox

  1. Please download & install Firefox nightly, beta and release
  2. Create new profiles for each version + your own profile. Read Multiple Firefox Profiles for more help with the profile manager.

Handy Links

How To and Oft-Used

General info on module owners and partners:

Bugzilla

Reports

Queries

In your bugzilla preferences, under Saved Searches, you can add some of the following to your footer for quick access:

Tools

Repos to check out if you are going to develop

Helpful webextensions

Community Contributors

Some of the above access & permissions will either not be accessible to community contributors or it might take a bit longer to achieve depending on the level & needs of the contributions being made.

Currently when Early Feedback Community Release Managers are onboarded we're basing it on these blog posts (one was based on the other). The short version is that we're looking for people who are interested in understanding how Release Management in a major Open Source project works and our hope is that they learn while also helping us maintain a higher level of quality and visibility into release-affecting issues than a small team of employees can manage.

How that can play out is in several ways. First, any new community member who wants to work with RelMan should have a very informal conversation with a current staff member to discuss their experience, interests, and then ultimately to come up with a good time for a regular meeting that can onboard them (if they're still interested) over a period of weeks & months.

Depending on the volunteer's time availability, usually 1 or 2 hour-long triage sessions a week are feasible. Ideally these will at least sometimes include other members of the team so that the new contributor is getting to know the rest of the members. Eventually the contributor should also start getting invited to (and attending when possible) our 30 min weekly team meeting.

Links to get started

Fun Tips & Tricks

Subcribe to fun stuff

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