Last week, the Firefox for Android team, and some friends, had a team meetup at the Mozilla Toronto office. As is typical for Mozilla, the team is quite distributed so getting together, face to face, is refreshing. The agenda for the week was fairly simple: Brainstorm new feature ideas, discuss ways to make our workflow better, and provide some time for fun hacking.
We spent most of our time brainstorming, first at a high level, then we picked a few ideas/concepts to drill into. The high level list ended up with over 150 ideas. These ranged from blue-sky features, building on existing features, performance and UX improvements, and removing technical debt. Some of the areas where we had deeper discussions included:
- Sharing: We talked about ways to improve the current Quick Share system by making it more context-aware, adding support for default providers and supporting Quick Share from more than the main menu. We also discussed adding support for more explicit sharing with integrated services. This would allow more control than Android’s Intent system supports by itself.
- Cloud Services: We found that there are plenty of ways we can integrate with cloud services. Whether it’s a way to backup parts of your profile, pull external search results into the Awesomescreen, or use other services as a source for the Reading List. Lots of project ideas were created from this concept.
- Focused UX: There were a lot of discussions around how specific types of users could benefit from new features. We ended up grouping some of these together around commonalities, which include: Privacy oriented features, parental control and child web-safety features, and hardening the application by reducing ways to corrupt the state and providing ways to rollback to a good state. While these ideas might fall into common groups, we decided that many of the details would benefit all users.
We also took some time to examine our workflow. We found some rough edges we intend to smooth out. We also ended up with a better understanding of our current, somewhat organic, workflow. Look for more write-ups from the team on this as we pull the information together. One technical outcome of the the discussions was a critical examination of our automated testing situation. We decided that we depend entirely too much on Robotium for testing our Java UI and non-UI code. Plans are underway to add some JUnit test support for the non-UI code.
The Android team is very committed to working with contributors and have been doing a great job attracting and mentoring code contributors. Last week they started discussing how to attract other types of contributors, focusing on bug triage as the next possible area. Desktop Firefox has had some great bug triage support from the community, so it seems like a natural candidate. Look for more information about that effort coming soon.
There was also some time for hacking on code. Some of the hacking was pure fun stuff. I saw a twitterbot and an IRCbot created. There was also a lot of discussion and hacking on add-on APIs that provide more integration hooks for add-on developers into the Java UI. Of course there is usually a fire that needs to be put out, and we had one this time as well. The front-end team quickly pulled together to implement a late-breaking design change to the new Home page. It’s been baking on Nightly for a few days now and will start getting uplifted to Aurora by the end of the week.
All in all, it was a great week. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next!