Firefox3.5.5 was released on Thursday 05-nov-2009, at 16:00PST.

This was our fastest turnaround on a release. By far.

From “Dev says go” to “release is now available to public” was approx 3 days (3d 4h 45m) wall-clock time. Release Engineering took 13-16hours. By comparison, the next fastest release turnaround was FF3.5.3 (~37hours) and FF2.0.0.9 (~37hours).

11:13 02nov: Dev says “go” for FF3.5.5
13:06 02nov: FF3.5.5 builds started
17:05 02nov: FF3.5.3 linux, mac builds handed to QA
20:03 02nov: FF3.5.3 signed-win32 builds handed to QA
00:28 03nov: FF3.5.3 update snippets available on test update channel
22:00 04nov: Dev & QA says “go” for Beta, and for Release; Build already completed final signing, bouncer entries
07:30 05nov: mirror replication started
10:55 05nov: mirror absorption good enough for testing
14:40 05nov: website changes finalized and visible. Build given “go” to make updates snippets live.
14:51 05nov: update snippets available on live update channel
16:00 05nov: release announced

Notes:

1) As we continue streamlining this process, now the long pole is communication between the groups, and also how the websites release notes are assembled and published. For this release, there were 8.5 9.5 hours of waiting between “go to mirrors” and “mirror push started”. Most of Thursday was spent updating release notes on websites. Meanwhile, we populated the mirrors, which takes ~3.5 hours of watching mirrors, but only took two brief commands on our part.

3) Our blow-by-blow scribbles are public, so the curious can read all about it here. Those Build Notes also link to our tracking bug#525814.
This super-super fast release turnaround was handled calmly and efficiently. It was a real credit to the team to see how well everyone worked well together on this, including smooth handoffs back-and-forth across timezones so everyone still had a life !

take care
John.