Much of Q4 is spent planning and budgeting for the next year, so there’s been lots of discussion about which efforts will need support next year and which things we can accommodate with existing resources and which will need additional resources.

And if planning and budgeting doesn’t scare some Hallowe'en spirit into you, I don’t know what will.

Modernize infrastructure: Q got most of the automated installation of w10 working and is now focusing on making sure that jobs run.

Improve CI pipeline: Andrew (with help from Dustin) will be running a bunch of test suites in TaskCluster (based on TaskCluster-built binaries) at Tier 2.

Release: Callek built v1.5 of the OpenH264 Plugin, and pushed it out to the testing audience. Expecting to go live to our users in the next few weeks.

Callek managed to get “final verify” (an update test with all live urls) working on taskcluster in support of the “release promotion” project.

Firefox 42, our big moment-in-time release for the second half of 2015, gets released to the general public next week. Fingers are crossed.

Operational: Kim and Amy decommissioned about 50% of the remaining panda infrastructure (physical mobile testing boards) after shifting the load to AWS.

We repurposed 30 of our Linux64 talos machines for Windows 7 testing in preparation for turning on some e10s tests.

Kim turned off WinXP tests off by default on try to try to reduce some of our windows backlog (https://bugzil.la/1219434).

Kim implemented some changes to SETA which would allow us to configure the SETA parameters on a per platform basis (https://bugzil.la/1175568).

Rail performed the mozilla-central train uplifts a week early when the Release Management plans shifted, turning Nightly into Gecko 45. FirefoxOS v2.5 branch based on Gecko 44 has been created as a part of the uplift.

Callek investigated a few hours of nothing being scheduled on try on Tuesday, to learn there was an issue with a unicode character in the commit message which broke JSON importing of pushlog. And then did work to reschedule all those jobs (https://bugzil.la/1218943).

Industry News: In addition to the work we do at Mozilla, a number of our people are leaders in industry and help organize, teach, and speak. These are some of the upcoming events people are involved with:

• Amy Rich is co-chairing the 29th annual LISA (Large Installation System Administration) conference in Washington D.C. from November 8th - 13th. https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa15/ She was interviewed about the upcoming conference by opensource.com: https://opensource.com/business/15/10/lisa15-interview-amy-rich-mozilla
• Chris Cooper is one of the organizers of URES15 (the USENIX Release Engineering Summit) https://www.usenix.org/conference/ures15 in Washington D.C. on November 13th.
• Kim Moir is speaking about our mobile test infrastructure at URES: https://www.usenix.org/conference/ures15/summit-program/presentation/moir-scaling-mobile-testing
• Dustin Mitchell and Michal Purzynski are speaking at LISA about our firewall unit tests: https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa15/conference-program/presentation/mitchell

SUntil next week, remember: don’t take candy from strangers!

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