Releases/Thunderbird 3.1b2/Post Mortem

Post Mortem for the Thunderbird release of 3.1b2 (DialIn Info)

What went well

• Shipped a good, solid release
• Froze strings _and_ features before start of first RC (first time ever?)
• Got most of the things we were targetting in

What could have gone better, and lessons learned

String Freeze

• too many late strings
• at least one localizability bug (migration asst images) not found/triaged until too late
• Haven't had much push-back from localisers.
• Not too many issues otherwise.
• still had features landing late.
  • We had to land specific features due to the Major Update
  • Hopefully in future can land features when they are ready, and not necessarily at last minute (due to more agile/branch working).

Code Freeze

• happened later than planned
• too much code landed at the last possible minute

• Could have slipped in an extra beta
  • Still feels like a lot of work for betas.
• Can we restructure post 3.1?
  • Ship frequently with "milestones"
  • Can we automate QA etc, make it lower cost.

Release Notes

• Need to pull out common variables to the top of the file.
• Can we keep a rolling update of release notes?
  • Generally works well at the moment, may be something to consider later.

Build

• Reasonable smooth
• Signing went wrong for no real reason.
• Main confusion was renaming from Lanikai -> Thunderbird
  • Update generation didn't like this

QA

• Test coverage was 90% (about the same as in the past).
• May want to improve migration & import litmus tests
• How much bugzilla coverage did we get?

L10n

• New dashboard may have caused some confusion.
  • 36 locales were green, only 33 included in the revision.
  • Simon was busy, so possibly didn't have time to chase up locales.

Attendees

dmose, Standard8, andreas, gozer, wsmwk, bienvenu, bwinton, rebron