Identity/Crews

One Team, Many Crews

We want to explore new ideas. To be productive, explorations should be focused and time-limited. If they don't work out, they should be killed. We'll fail often. Such is the cost of innovating.

So we're creating project-centric "crews." Each will be at most 5 people, with 1 lead. Identity team members may belong to more than 1 crew, but can only lead 1 at a time.

Each crew will be assigned for 2 months by default, after which initial results should be evaluated by the team as a whole. Outcome will be either

(a) success, merge into production

(b) looking good, but needs more time (2 more months max)

(c) kill it.

This means that no problem we undertake should take more than 4 months to hit production. If a project is particularly large, we may stretch that to 2 3-month cycles, but a minimum viable product is absolutely required within 6 months, and the first review should show great promise to merit a second cycle.

Current Crew List

Project	Overview	Target	Crew
Firefox OS	The identity group will support the mozilla Firefox OS initiative and build the identity solution for the mobile platform. This will happen very fast and be awesome.	Dec 2012	Ben (Lead), Jed, Austin, Zach, Sean
QA Automation	An effort to build a complete and robust set of automated in-browser tests to both increase product quality and reduce QA time.	Nov 2012	Jared (Lead), John M., Shane
KPI (Improved metrics for Persona)	The KPI crew will roll out privacy respecting instrumentation to give us emperical data to understand and optimize usability of the persona product.	Dec 2012	Katie (Lead), Shane, Jed
Proxy IdP (BigTent)	"Big Tent" makes it so users of popular email providers use their existing password (and session) with their provider to sign in.	Dec 2012	Austin (Lead), Dan C., Sean
Dialup Performance	We will build a way to quantitatively evaluate product performance on high latency / low bandwidth connections, and optimize the product to be usable in these environments.	Dec 2012	Francois (Lead), Shane, Dan C.
Native SDKs [Q4 STRETCH]	Making it easy to use persona for authentication in iOS apps, and from (i.e.) browser extensions.	TBD	Dan W., Sean
Password Manager (SkyCrane) : Server Prototype	A server implementation sufficient to build addons and iOS apps against. Functional APIs, without the fancy crypto.	Nov 2012	Brian, Lloyd
Password Manager (SkyCrane) : Server Alpha	Refinement of APIs and completed implementation of required cryptography in this product - passwords should never be readable by the server.	Dec 2012	Brian, Lloyd
Password Manager (SkyCrane) : Chrome Add-on	Complete alpha quality implementation of initial required features in the Skycrane MVP for chrome.	Dec 2012	Paul, Zach
Password Manager (SkyCrane) : Firefox Add-on	Complete alpha quality implementation of initial required features in the Skycrane MVP for firefox.	Dec 2012	Paul, Zach
Password Manager (SkyCrane) : iOS App	Complete alpha quality implementation of initial required features in the Skycrane MVP for iOS	Dec 2012	Dan W
Firefox Accounts		Dec 2012	Brian & Francois
ZeroToSixty (Scaling up the persona service)	We need to have a good estimate of current capacity and a clear plan to handle increased usage.	Jan 2013	Lloyd, Gene, Zach, Others?
Dev Env Upgrade (INTCLUSTER crew)	The development/integration environment for persona is very different than staging and production. This causes issues to be identified late in the testing cycle and prevents regular releases. This crew will make the dev env more similar to production.	Jan 2013	Jared (Lead), Austin, Lloyd (consultant)
Beta 2 Go To Market!	Beta 2 will introduce important features for usability, this crew will explain these features to the press and do some fist pumping.	Jan 2013	TBD

Creating a crew

Currently, we've only gotten as far as having core Identity devs lead crews. Interested community members are welcome to push on this point.

1. Propose a crew on the dev-identity list & refine its goals, timeline, and description
2. Find collaborators
3. Add crew info to list of active crews on the main Identity wiki page:
   • crew name (linked to crew wiki page), one-liner description, core crew members, target date
4. Create a wiki sub-page for your crew with long-lived info:
   • goals, timeline, description, other getting-started info
5. Create documents to manage tasks and hold short-lived info. Identity tends to use the identity etherpad for this purpose, but any tool is fine, so long as it's linked from the crew's main wiki page.
6. Create a mailing list for your crew. The naming convention is dev-identity-foo for the foo crew; file a bugzilla ticket to have a mailing list created.

Joining a crew

Contributors welcome!

1. Subscribe & say hello on the dev-identity list or, better, the crew's specific mailing list
2. Check out the wiki docs and the lower-level information
3. Jump in :-)

Managing a crew

It's on crew leads to ensure that the crew is killin' it:

• ensure goals still reflect reality; ping dev-identity to discuss any big changes
• every thursday by EOD, send weekly status updates to toxborrow, who will collate and publish on the wiki
• ping the main dev-identity list as milestones come and go, or as cool stuff happens
• schedule bug triage or sync-up meetings as needed

Deactivating a crew

1. Ping the dev-identity list once more with the over-and-out message
2. Archive the crew's mailing list
3. Update the main identity wiki page, moving the crew's entry to the deactivated list
4. Update the crew's wiki page, indicating that it's been deactivated
5. Consider pulling low-level content into lower-level wiki pages (rather than etherpads, which aren't indexed & hide info)

Feedback

Feedback/questions welcome on the dev-identity list.

References

• Discussion of the crew concept on the dev-identity mailing list
• Discussion around crews & documentation on the dev-identity list