As most of you already know, Firefox3.6.6 was released on Saturday 26-jun-2010, at 20:42PST. However, did you know this was our fastest ever turnaround on a Firefox release? That was our first time shipping a release inside a 24hour day.

From “Dev says go” to “release is now available to public” was 22h 33m wall-clock time. The Release Engineering portion of that was 10h 15m. By comparison, our previous fastest release turnaround was FF3.5.5 (3d 4h 45m from start to finish, with Release Engineering taking 13-16hours). For FF3.6.6, the times were:

22:09 25jun: Dev says “go” for FF3.6.6
22:18 25jun: FF3.6.6 builds started
00:17 26jun: FF3.6.6 linux, mac, unsigned-win32 builds handed to QA
02:20 26jun: FF3.6.6 signed-win32 builds handed to QA
07:40 26jun: FF3.6.6 update snippets available on test update channel
17:15 26jun: Dev & QA says “go” for Release; Build already completed final signing, bouncer entries
17:35 26jun: mirror replication started
18:00 26jun: mirror absorption good enough for testing
20:30 26jun: website changes finalized and visible. Build given “go” to make updates snippets live.
20:32 26jun: update snippets available on live update channel
20:42 26jun: release announced

Notes:

1) This is an awesome new record for the fastest Firefox release since I started recording wall-clock times. Its even more awesome when you add complications like:
* it was a firedrill release we had no advance warning about.
* it started late Friday night – the worst possible in terms of RelEng’s almost-global timezone coverage.
* lack-of-responsiveness from external partners delayed verification of fix by a few hours.

2) As usual, our blow-by-blow scribbles are public, so you can read all the details here or in tracking bug#574906.

This super-super fast release turnaround showed how the ongoing release-automation work continues to improve times – and also how well the teams worked together on this, including the smooth handoffs back-and-forth across timezones!

Awesome. Truly awesome.

Thank you
John.