Long time readers of this blog will remember when The Architecture of Open Source Applications (vol2) was published, containing a chapter describing the tools and mindsets used when re-building Mozilla’s Release Engineering infrastructure. (More details about the book, about the kindle and nook versions, and about the Russian version(!).

Dr Dobbs recently posted an article here which is an edited version of the Mozilla Release Engineering chapter. As a long time fan of Dr Dobbs, seeing this was quite an honor, even with the sad news here.

Obviously, Mozilla’s release automation continues to evolve, as new product requirements arise, or new tools help further streamline things. There is still lots of interesting work being done here – for me, top of mind is Task Cluster, and ScriptHarness (v0.1.0 and v0.2.0). Release Engineering at scale is both complex, and yet very interesting – so you should keep watching these sites for more details, and consider if they would also help in your current environment. As they are all open source, you can of course join in and help!

For today, I just re-read the Dr. Dobbs article with a fresh cup of coffee, and remembered the various different struggles we went through as we scaled Mozilla’s infrastructure up so we could quickly grow the company, and the community. And then in the middle of it all, found time with armenzg, catlee and lsblakk to write about it all. While some of the technical tools have changed since the chapter was written, and some will doubtless change again in the future, the needs of the business, the company and the community still resonate.

For anyone doing Release Engineering at scale, the article is well worth a quiet read.