“congrats on drastically improving this meeting (IMHO) I am feeling greatly optimistic about mozilla all of a sudden”

– Brad Lassey (ref)

The Platform meeting has been in limbo for some time. Since taking the helm in February, I found it difficult to answer questions like: What is the purpose of this meeting? Who is the target audience? Why do we meet each week? After discussions in the meeting and on the Mozilla dev-platform mailing list, this week I made a mostly wholesale change and rebooted the meeting.

The Engineering Meeting

The name “Platform Meeting” is a holdover from the meeting’s origins. This meeting has long included updates from non platform teams such as the desktop front-end, mobile front-end, and stability teams. More recently, the meeting added updates from Firefox OS and Firefox Metro. This is really an engineering wide meeting so let’s call it the “Engineering Meeting”.

Meeting Purpose

One of my goals with this reboot was to be able to clearly articulate what this meeting was about. My working definition of the meeting’s purpose is:

The Engineering meeting is a weekly time to discuss the work of engineering teams and share information relevant to the day-to-day work of engineers.

Meeting Agenda

I restructured the meeting agenda around the meeting purpose. The meeting now focuses on engineering teams and the relevant information from engineering support teams. I have also asked each person responsible for an agenda item to update the wiki the day before the meeting so as to have a set agenda before the meeting starts.

Agenda

Actions

Action items from previous meetings. Hot Bugs

Orange Factor, Stability, and other high priority bugs that are currently unowned or require help to make progress. The Need To Know

Release related notices and schedule and upcoming system outages and upgrades. Key Issues

Bigger topics and non team specific issues that are of interest to Engineering. Team Stand-ups

A short (<2 min) update from each engineering team. No questions during the updates! Quality Programs

An opportunity to hear about relevant updates from our Critsmash, Memshrink, Orange Factor, and Stability initiatives. Roundtable

All other issues and any questions that come up over the course of the meeting.

Meeting Time

The meeting time remains unchanged. The Engineering Meeting is held Tuesdays, at 11am PT. Details about joining this public meeting are available on wikimo.

Meeting Notes

One of the requests that came from the dev-platform discussion was for improved meeting notes. I would like to know whether the changes that have been made to the meeting agenda have resulted in an improvement to the notes. If you read the notes, I would appreciate your input. Please comment on this post, post to dev-platform, or e-mail me privately. For your reference, here’s a link to this week’s notes.

Feedback From the First Meeting

The feedback after the first meeting was very positive. Here’s a sample from IRC:

“congrats on drastically improving this meeting (IMHO) I am feeling greatly optimistic about mozilla all of a sudden”

– Brad Lassey (ref) “this is the change we needed”

– Doug Turner (ref) “yeah i think i’m going to start coming to these regularly again”

– Jesse Ruderman (ref) “this is exactly what I wanted to get out of this meeting”

– Daniel Veditz (ref) “this meeting was very useful to me, learned several interesting things”

– Gavin Sharp (ref)

A Work In Progress

I consider the Engineering Meeting a work in progress. This meeting should continue to evolve to meet the needs of our engineering teams. Have an idea to improve the meeting? Please post to dev-platform or get in touch with me privately.