The roads I take...

I have blogged recently about my contract to help in the area of crash reporting. Specifically, I am trying to help the Socorro team (which works on the crash-stats system) by gathering and presenting the engineering needs and use cases for reports and features that help us analyze trends and find and diagnose problems quickly. I'm not on the Socorro team myself but on the CrashKill team, which makes sure that the most important stability problems in Firefox actually get addressed. I will work closely with the Socorro team to ensure that they have what they need to implement some of these features and understand their priorities so they can find the right place on their roadmap. Understanding what crash-stats users need helps ensure we ship as stable as possible Firefox releases.

In this context, if you are using the crash-stats system, I would like your input; What are some of the use cases you run into most often? I'd be interested in hearing from developers, QA, release manager, etc. What questions are you trying to answer from crash-stats?

I will be going through many of the items currently in bugzilla and helping to prioritize them as well as put together detailed specs. Helping determine the criteria for detecting explosive crashes is one issue I am currently working on. If you think of additional reports that would be useful, please make sure there are bugs filed (under Webtools/Socorro) and CC me so I can understand the requests and help to get them in the development pipeline.

Thank you!

A few months ago, I stated that my personal priorities are changing - and the more I've been thinking about my and SeaMonkey's future, I saw that I really want to go where innovation is and the future of the open web is being built and not just consumed - and the more I tried to look at things with a hypothetical Firefox hat on, the more I felt like that would be where I wanted to be. It feels better for me to think about proposals I read about in terms of "what does this mean for Mozilla as a whole" rather than "what does this mean for SeaMonkey". I feel more at home in those terms as well as bringing Firefox and the open web forward - even if I'm still deeply into SeaMonkey for the moment.

Given all that, I started to shift a number of my responsibilities in the SeaMonkey project over to other people - like Callek for release engineering, for example - and I'm working on more in that area. In the end, I probably want to end up only having the German localization and the comm-central build system ownership left, as well as being one of the members of the SeaMonkey Council - for now. But there's still some way to go there, and I'm trying to make this a smooth, step-by-step process so that the SeaMonkey project can come out as strong or even stronger than before from this period.

At the same time - and here's the meat of this post as well as something that has been brewing for a while - I'm starting to get my feet wet in different areas. Starting today, I'm officially working for Mozilla part of my time - for now, this means contracting on a roughly 3-month project I'm working on half-time, but I hope this proves to be a fruitful relationship that has some great times still to come.

My work within Mozilla is positioned in the general area of program management - the concrete project I will be working on in the upcoming months is putting together a strategy for Socorro (the crash stats system we're using). I will not work on the code, but rather work with the Socorro team and the other Mozilla managers and developers to find a roadmap for what the developers will work on in the following months that will bring some additional perspective of how to use the crash system to help enable people to make product release decisions, and not just around analyzing specific crash bugs. There is a lot of work here to consolidate the over 400 change requests and bugs that have built up around the Socorro system, and create some more details specs for some of the more intricate areas that will help us to build systems that help to understand our crash data better, and how to use it more effectively. I can definitely use suggestions across the entire community of how we can meet this goal more effectively.

The positive side in terms of a transition for myself is that Socorro affects all Mozilla applications and I have some experience (even if not too much) in looking at it and seeing what this system is actually about. Also, having release management experience for a Mozilla project and having been following discussions of Firefox release managers as well as the security group helps in having insights into what is in the focus when it comes to looking at crash reports and statistics.

For me personally, I have dubbed this project "Veridian 3" and in the first round of bug triage I'll be doing, my internal tags will start off with "V3" because of that - but this name will probably not leak outside my private use, for other people's sanity.

There's a good amount of intense work ahead and some things I'm not used to like reporting to a specific person or making plans other people are actually paid to work on, but I'm confident to master those and come out with having my part in helping us all to have a better crash stats system.

So be prepared to see me appearing somewhat less in the usual places but instead in some new areas in the near future!