Margaret Leibovic

As part of the Grow Mozilla effort, the coding stewards have been working to grow our coding community. Our main focus has been to increase the number of contributions to the core mozilla-central codebase, which includes making it easier for newcomers to get started, as well as keeping existing contributors engaged. Recent work has been focused on things like mentored bugs and recognizing contributors.

We hold open weekly meetings every Wednesday to discuss progress on these goals, but we want to give more developers the opportunity to get involved with this effort, so we created the coding-stewards@mozilla.org mailing list for broader discussion. If you’re interested in growing our coding community, but you might not be interested in another weekly meeting, please join the list!

Last week I attended a community building meetup in Toronto, where I had the opportunity to meet with individuals who are driving volunteer participation across different areas of the Mozilla project. Together we discussed the things our teams are doing to engage volunteers, and we brainstormed ways that we can continue to grow Mozilla. These discussions gave me lots of ideas about what we can do to grow our Firefox for Android community, but most of them boiled down to three main points.

1. Improve communication. The first part of getting involved in a project is figuring out what’s going on. Our team tends to have lots of discussions on IRC and in Bugzilla, which is great if you’re following those channels closely, but it can be hard for a casual observer to keep up. We’re already trying to address this issue with a new mailing list for development discussions, as well as Twitter and Tumblr accounts for more lightweight updates. Mark Finkle just wrote a blog post covering these communication channels in more detail.

2. Diversify opportunities. When newcomers show up, we help them set up a build environment and point them at a list of mentor bugs. This is a great way to get started, but it doesn’t provide a path to becoming a core contributor, or a path toward other types of contributions. I’d like us to encourage more advanced contributions, such as helping debug difficult crashes, or working on bugs that will help us complete a feature we’re targeting for a given release. I also want us to do a better job advertising all the different ways someone can contribute to Firefox for Android, especially testing and support. Our “Get Involved” page mentions some of these opportunities, but there’s probably more we can do.

3. Manage expectations. Even though we do our best to make it easy, writing a patch is hard. New contributors need to remember that it can take a significant amount of effort to get a patch accepted, and core team members need to remember that it takes time for newcomers to develop the knowledge that we often take for granted. We also need to recognize that newcomers are volunteering their time to help improve Firefox, and that mentors are volunteering their time to help grow our community. It’s a lot of work all around, but no one ever said open source software was easy!

While helping new contributors start hacking on Firefox for Android and Firefox OS, I’ve realized that getting comfortable with Bugzilla is a really important part of getting ramped up. Over the years, people have come up with various tips, tricks and tools for making Bugzilla easier to use, and I thought it would be helpful to gather those into one handy blog post!

To start, if you’ve never used Bugzilla before (or even if you have), you should watch a video johnath made called “Bugzilla for Humans”. It gives a nice overview of key Bugzilla features, as well as tips for more advanced users.

After that, you should watch beltzner’s quicksearch video to get a more familiar with Bugzilla’s quicksearch feature. In your browser, you should add a bookmark keyword to search for bugs from your location bar. You can also add Bugzilla to your list of available search engines in your search bar. For a complete list of things you can do with quicksearch, check out the quicksearch reference on Bugzilla.

If you find yourself interested in a certain area of the Mozilla project, you can opt to watch its Bugzilla component. You can also watch certain users, which is a neat feature if you’re a new contributor looking to follow the activity of a more experienced developer. If you’re a new contributor working on a mentor bug, you should watch your mentor to see what he or she is up to! If you start watching components you’ll definitely want to set up some sort of filter to handle your bugmail. For inspiration, you can see what other Bugzilla users have done to handle their Bugmail.

Because Bugzilla has a REST API, people have made tools on top of Bugzilla to make certain tasks easier. For example, there are tools to file new bugs, track a user’s bug activity, and find mentored bugs. There’s also a Firefox add-on that modifies Bugzilla itself to make things easier.

Last, but not least, you should read Bugzilla’s etiquette guidelines to understand what behavior is expected of Bugzilla users. In general, just be a nice person and everyone will be happy!

This is just a quick overview, but if anyone out there has more helpful tips, please share them in the comments!