John O’Duinn’s Soapbox

Last week we shipped our 5th funnelcake release.

Ken has been leading us doing one funnelcake release per month for 3 months now. Ken can best discuss the significance of all the stats/metrics which these funnelcake releases make possible.

However, I’m more interested in the process. I stumbled across this diagram in bugzilla. To me, this diagram accurately captures how different groups within Mozilla are coordinated do a specific funnelcake release. Having the bug dependencies match the reality is really important. In a time-crunch, with lots of people switching hands, it does make it easy to quickly see what needs to be done next. Each time we do a release, the process gets just a little more refined, and more efficient.

(click through to live bugzilla graph - with options at bottom to change how graph is drawn.)

Hope the diagram helps explain some of the mechanics?

John.

(Personally, I think its a little weird how arrows go “towards” the dependent bugs, not “away from” the dependent bugs. This feels like the “wrong” way to me, but hey, thats just my perspective/style. Certainly the dependencies and interconnected-ness of the bugs is accurate. We havent done a formal post-mortem yet, but based on informal discussions last week, each funnelcake releases feels like an improvement on prior releases; we should be able to improve on this release also.)