Operations Group Meeting, 9 October 2007

Agenda

• Project check in: Server, Desktop, Hub, QA, PPD
  • important threads or issues ppl should pay attention to?
  • threads or issues blocking?
  • Desktop: remove "Preview" strings from trunk builds?
• Focus on user adoption
  • evangelism
  • user feedback being fed back into product
  • interop
• Governance follow up
• Strategy follow up

Project check in: Server, Desktop, Hub, QA, PPD

• Server : 0.8 is in QA. QA to take till the end of the week. Putting something together for 0.9 discussion. Mimi's prioritized list for 1.0 is not reflecting in bugzilla (as Ted as targeted in bugzilla). The priorities do not match. Ted suggests looking at the severities. We should connect the dots from Mimi with the rest of the team. Blocking item : Getting enough stuff loaded for the team to work on 0.9. Matt has enough but it's mostly the scheduling work that needs to be put to rest. Brian and Mimi need to talk and get this nailed.
• Desktop : 0.7.1 should be scheduled for release tomorrow. People are working on 0.7.2. Architecture discussion going on. Sync up with PPD for 0.7.future items. Blocking item : Nailing the architecture discussion so team knows which direction is this going. Nothing blocking the team except the uncertainity about which direction to go.
• Hub : hub is stable. 0.7.4 is coming today. Nothing specific to Hub in 0.8 except some user reported errors. Do we need longer term Hub product roadmap? opera investigation stems from that. Important to prioritize those kind of bugs. Blocking item : hashing out whether qacosmo should be built according to Bear's scripts or Jared's.
• PPD : makign sure both the teams have what they need for the next immediate steps. Discussions on the list on the next set of items for both the releases.
• Desktop: remove "Preview" strings from trunk builds : Heikki will drive this on the list (chandler-dev).

Focus on user adoption

• Strategy : Growing user adoption is most important. Everything improves with better user adoption. We need to be on top of the interop story. Katie will start up an interop project with Jared's help.
• evangelism : Ted said he is basically knocking out things from the list from the evangelism meeting. Ted is doing a daily sweep of blogs which talk about us. Escalate problems that are stopping adoption and move those up on the list. Any new user reported problems would go on top of the 0.9 list. Therefore shorter cycles maybe better atleast for cosmo. Possibly 2 week cycle will be better than 4 weeks in that sense.
• user adoption : Stephen O'grady's gutsy gibbon bug needs to be prioritized high. We should have the fix done in the branch and let him know so he can possibly pick up the fix and try it further. On demand builds can improve this in the long term. We will be doing builds on branches and this will improve user visibility and quicker turnaround on fixes. Our cutting edge users are running into cutting edge bugs. Jared asked how far were we from branch builds? Heikki said it's mostly manual work from bear - couple of hours. Katie said we should be bending over backwards for such high visibility issues. This is important and must happen. This guy is pretty influential. Jared has some metrics thing to report. Daily logins is not going up as expected. Data gathering for more than a week but less than a month. Scobel interview went well and Katie would write up about it. David ascher demo went well. Next action item is for Ted and David Ascher to meet and discuss is there is synergy between the 2 projects.

Governance follow up

• Managers spoke to their respective teams and none of them were overly surprised by anything in the email. Ted mentioned that there were some comments from his team about ownership being defined. Sometimes there is lack of clarity around what does PPD own. We need clear and unambiguous stated owner/driver for issues. Maybe a listing of open issues being driven within each project would be nice. Jared said more visibility into that would be nice. We should be making ownership explicit. Culture within mozilla is to declare module owner and nothing can get checked into the module without the consent or write off by the module owner. We will fix it when we notice a problem or someone reports a problem.

Strategy follow up

• Katie - setting up meetings, draft plausible scenarios
• Philippe - following up on bundle strategy. Vmware's virtual appliance thing looks promising. it's not new technology. It's about distribution mechanisms - but how we convert that into revenue. Discussing next steps between Jared and Bear.
• Jared - Back of the envelope calculations are delayed. He is talking to interested parties about web service, professional services as models and advocating open service
• Aparna - scheduled the talk with Zimbra VP for next Tuesday.
• Ted - Talking to people who can help in various ways
• Andi and morgen to work on the open change exchange plugin. Jared will follow up on the license stuff. There was consensus around exploring other exchange experiments. Katie to bring it to the strategy list.

Miscellaneous

• T-shirt allocation - use t-shirts for evangelism. Everone gets 3 tshirts for friends and family. Mimi to put up a store on cafe press and zazzle and other sites where you can order tshirts with logo in it. Once the store is setup we can link it from Facebook.

-- AparnaKadakia - 09 Oct 2007