It’s the first week of November, and because of the December all-hands and the end-of-year holidays, this essentially means the quarter is half over. You can see what the team is up to and how we’re tracking against our deliverables with this spreadsheet.

Highlights

hg.mozilla.org: gps did some interesting work investigating ways to increase cloning performance on Windows; it turns out closing files which have been appended is a very expensive process there. He also helped roll out bundle-related cloning improvements in Mercurial 3.6.

Community: jmaher has posted details about our newest Quarter of Contribution. One of our former Outreachy interns, adusca, has blogged about what she gets out of contributing to open source software.

MozReview and Autoland: dminor blogged about the most recent MozReview work week in Toronto. Meanwhile, mcote is busy trying to design a more intuitive way to deal with parent-child review requests. And glob, who is jumping in to help out with MozReview, has created a high-level diagram sketching out MozReview’s primary components and dependencies.

Autoland has been enabled for the version-control-tools repo and is being dogfooded by the team. We hope to have it turned on for landings to mozilla-inbound within a couple of weeks.

Treeherder: the team is in London this week working on the automatic starring project. They should be rolling out an experimental UI soon for feedback from sheriffs and others. armenzg has fixed several issues with automatic backfilling so it should be more useful.

Perfherder: wlach has blogged about recent improvements to Perfherder, including the ability to track the size of the Firefox installer.

Developer Workflows: gbrown has enabled |mach run| to work with Android.

TaskCluster Support: the mochitest-gl job on linux64-debug is now running in TaskCluster side-by-side with buildbot. Work is ongoing to green up other suites in TaskCluster. A few other problems (like failure to upload structured logs) need to be fixed before we can turn off the corresponding buildbot jobs and make the TaskCluster jobs “official”.

e10s Support: we are planning to turn on e10s tests on Windows 7 as they are greened up; the first job which will be added is the e10s version of mochitest-gl, and the next is likely mochitest-devtools-chrome. To help mitigate capacity impacts, we’ve turned off Windows XP tests by default on try in order to allow us to move some machines from the Windows XP pool to the Windows 7 pool, and some machines have already been moved from the Linux 64 pool (which only runs Talos and Android x86 tests) to the Windows 7 pool. Combined with some changes recently made by Releng, Windows wait times are currently not problematic.

WebDriver: ato, jgraham and dburns recently went to Japan to attend W3C TPAC to discuss the WebDriver specification. They will be extending the charter of the working group to get it through to CR. This will mean certain parts of the specification need to finished as soon as possible to start getting feedback.

The Details

hg.mozilla.org

• Better error messages during SSH failures (bug 1217964)
• Make pushlog compatible with Mercurial 3.6 (bug 1217569)
• Support Mercurial 3.6 clone bundles feature on hg.mozilla.org (bug 1216216)
  • Functionality from bundleclone extension that Mozilla wrote and deployed is now a feature in Mercurial itself!
• Advertise clone bundles feature to 3.6+ clients that don’t have it enabled (bug 1217155)
• Update the bundleclone extension to seamlessly integrate with now built-in clone bundles feature

MozReview/Autoland

• We’ve enabled Autoland to “Inbound” for the version-control-tools repository and are dogfooding it while working on UI and workflow improvements.
• Following up on some discussion around “squashed diffs”, an explanatory note has been added to the parent (squashed) review requests, which serves to distinguish them from, and to promote, review requests for individual commits.
• “Complete Diff” has been renamed to the more accurate “Squashed Diff”. The “Review Summary” link has been removed, but you can still get to the squashed-diff reviews via the squashed diff itself—but note that we’ll likely be removing support for squashed-diff reviews in order to promote the practices of splitting up large commits into smaller, standalone ones and reviewing each individually.
• A patch to track the files review status is now under review; it should land in the next few days.

Mobile Automation

• [gbrown] ‘mach run’ now supports Firefox for Android
• [bc] Helping out with Autophone Talos, mozdevice adb*.py maintenance

Firefox and Media Automation

• [maja_zf] Marionette test runner is now a litte more flexible and extensible: I’ve added some features needed by Firefox UI and Update tests that are useful to all desktop tests. (Bug 1212608)

ActiveData

• [ekyle] Buildbot JSON logs are imported, along with all text logs they point to: we should now have a complete picture of the time spent on all steps by all machines on all pools.   Still verifying the data though.

bugzilla.mozilla.org

• (bug 1213757) delegate password and 2fa resets to servicedesk
• (bug 1218457) Allow localconfig to override (force) certain data/params values (needed for AWS)
• (bug 1219750) Allow Apache2::SizeLimit to be configured via params
• (bug 1177911) Determine and implement better password requirements for BMO
• (bug 1196743) – Fix information disclosure vulnerability that allows attacker to obtain victim’s GitHub OAuth return code

Perfherder/Performance Testing

• Lots of improvements: http://wrla.ch/blog/2015/11/perfherder-onward/
  • Tracking installer size for Firefox in Perfherder now and make it easy to submit data to Perfherder from any treeherder job. Posted to dev.platform asking for feedback on what else we could start tracking: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/W0Xtx9yup5E
  • Compare view now supports filtering, links to graph view for viewing numbers in context
  • Lots of small fixes from Mike Ling (see blog post ^^ for details)
  • Performance sheriffing interface coming along (again, see blog post for screenshot)

TaskCluster Support

• [ahal] mochitest-webgl running on linux64 debug on all trunk branches

General Automation

• [ahal] reftest with structured logging working on b2g, except for a shutdown crash
• [armenzg] Fixed automatic backfilling of permanent failures and hidden jobs
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1195824
• [armenzg] Fixed automated backfilling dealing with out-of-date information about builders
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1216677
• [armenzg] Added alerts for automated backfilling

WebDriver

• We (ato, AutomatedTester, jgraham) went to Japan to W3C TPAC to discuss the WebDriver specification. We will be extending the charter of the working group to get it through to CR. This will mean certain parts of the specification need to finished as soon as possible to start getting feedback.

 

https://jagriffin.wordpress.com/2015/11/05/engineering-productivity-update-november-5-2015/