One of the central themes of my time at Mozilla has been my pursuit of making it easier to contribute to and hack on Firefox.

I vividly remember my first day at Mozilla in 2011 when I went to build Firefox for the first time. I thought the entire experience - from obtaining the source code, installing build dependencies, building, running tests, submitting patches for review, etc was quite... lacking. When I asked others if they thought this was an issue, many rightfully identified problems (like the build system being slow). But there was a significant population who seemed to be naive and/or apathetic to the breadth of the user experience shortcomings. This is totally understandable: the scope of the problem is immense and various people don't have the perspective, are blinded/biased by personal experience, and/or don't have the product design or UX experience necessary to comprehend the problem.

When it comes to contributing to Firefox, I think the problems have as much to do with user experience (UX) as they do with technical matters. As I wrote in 2012, user experience matters and developers are people too. You can have a technically superior product, but if the UX is bad, you will have a hard time attracting and retaining new users. And existing users won't be as happy. These are the kinds of problems that a product manager or designer deals with. A difference is that in the case of Firefox development, the target audience is a very narrow and highly technically-minded subset of the larger population - much smaller than what your typical product targets. The total addressable population is (realistically) in the thousands instead of millions. But this doesn't mean you ignore the principles of good product design when designing developer tooling. When it comes to developer tooling and workflows, I think it is important to have a product manager mindset and treat it not as a collection of tools for technically-minded individuals, but as a product having an overall experience. You only have to look as far as the Firefox Developer Tools to see this approach applied and the positive results it has achieved.

Historically, Mozilla has lacked a formal team with the domain expertise and mandate to treat Firefox contribution as a product. We didn't have anything close to this until a few years ago. Before we had such a team, I took on some of these problems individually. In 2012, I wrote mach - a generic CLI command dispatch tool - to provide a central, convenient, and easy-to-use command to discover development actions and to run them. (Read the announcement blog post for some historical context.) I also introduced a one-line bootstrap tool (now mach bootstrap) to make it easier to configure your machine for building Firefox. A few months later, I was responsible for introducing moz.build files, which paved the way for countless optimizations and for rearchitecting the Firefox build system to use modern tools - a project that is still ongoing (digging out from ~two decades of technical debt is a massive effort). And a few months after that, I started going down the version control rabbit hole and improving matters there. And I was also heavily involved with MozReview for improving the code review experience.

Looking back, I was responsible for and participated in a ton of foundational changes to how Firefox is developed. Of course, dozens of others have contributed to getting us to where we are today and I can't and won't take credit for the hard work of others. Nor will I claim I was the only person coming up with good ideas or transforming them into reality. I can name several projects (like Taskcluster and Treeherder) that have been just as or more transformational than the changes I can take credit for. It would be vain and naive of me to elevate my contributions on a taller pedestal and I hope nobody reads this and thinks I'm doing that.

(On a personal note, numerous people have told me that things like mach and the bootstrap tool have transformed the Firefox contribution experience for the better. I've also had very senior people tell me that they don't understand why these tools are important and/or are skeptical of the need for investments in this space. I've found this dichotomy perplexing and troubling. Because some of the detractors (for lack of a better word) are highly influential and respected, their apparent skepticism sews seeds of doubt and causes me to second guess my contributions and world view. This feels like a form or variation of imposter syndrome and it is something I have struggled with during my time at Mozilla.)

From my perspective, the previous five or so years in Firefox development workflows has been about initiating foundational changes and executing on them. When it was introduced, mach was radical. It didn't do much and its use was optional. Now almost everyone uses it. Similar stories have unfolded for Taskcluster, MozReview, and various other tools and platforms. In other words, we laid a foundation and have been steadily building upon it for the past several years. That's not to say other foundational changes haven't occurred since (they have - the imminent switch to Phabricator is a terrific example). But the volume of foundational changes has slowed since 2012-2014. (I think this is due to Mozilla deciding to invest more in tools as a result of growing pains from significant company expansion that began in 2010. With that investment, we invested in the bigger ticket long-standing workflow pain points, such as CI (Taskcluster), the Firefox build system, Treeherder, and code review.)

Workflows Today and in the Future

Over the past several years, the size, scope, and complexity of Firefox development activities has increased.

One way to see this is at the source code level. The following chart shows the size of the mozilla-central version control repository over time.

The size increases are obvious. The increases cumulatively represent new features, technologies, and workflows. For example, the repository contains thousands of Web Platform Tests (WPT) files, a shared test suite for web platform implementations, like Gecko and Blink. WPT didn't exist a few years ago. Now we have files under source control, tools for running those tests, and workflows revolving around changing those tests. The incorporation of Rust and components of Servo into Firefox is also responsible for significant changes. Firefox features such as Developer Tools have been introduced or ballooned in size in recent years. The Go Faster project and the move to system add-ons has introduced various new workflows and challenges for testing Firefox.

Many of these changes are building upon the user-facing foundational workflow infrastructure that was last significantly changed in 2012-2014. This has definitely contributed to some growing pains. For example, there are now 92 mach commands instead of like 5. mach help - intended to answer what can I do and how should I do it - is overwhelming, especially to new users. The repository is around 2 gigabytes of data to clone instead of around 500 megabytes. We have 240,000 files in a full checkout instead of 70,000 files. There's a ton of new pieces floating around. Any product manager tasked with user acquisition and retention will tell you that increasing the barrier to entry and use will jeopardize these outcomes. But with the growth of Firefox's technical underbelly in the previous years, we've made it harder to contribute by requiring users to download and see a lot more files (version control) and be overwhelmed by all the options for actions to take (mach having 92 commands). And as the sheer number of components constituting Firefox increases, it becomes harder and harder for everyone - not just new contributors - to reason about how everything fits together.

I've been framing this general problem as scaling Firefox development workflows and every time I think about the high-level challenges facing Firefox contribution today and in the years ahead, this problem floats to the top of my list of concerns. Yes, we have pressing issues like improving the code review experience and making the Firefox build system and Taskcluster-based CI fast, efficient, and reliable. But even if you make these individual pieces great, there is still a cross-domain problem of how all these components weave together. This is why I think it is important to take a wholistic view and treat developer workflow as a product.

When I look at this the way a product manager or designer would, I see a few fundamental problems that need addressing.

First, we're not optimizing for comprehensive end-to-end workflows. By and large, we're designing our tools in isolation. We focus more on maximizing the individual components instead of maximizing the interaction between them. For example, Taskcluster and Treeherder are pretty good in isolation. But we're missing features like Treeherder being able to tell me the command to run locally to reproduce a failure: I want to see a failure on Treeherder and be able to copy and paste commands into my terminal to debug the failure. In the case of code review, we've designed two good code review tools (MozReview and Phabricator) but we haven't invested in making submitting code reviews turn key (the initial system configuration is difficult and we still don't have things like automatic bug filing or reviewer selection). We are leaving many workflow optimizations on the table by not implementing thoughtful tie-ins and transitions between various tools.

Second, by-and-large we're still optimizing for a single, monolithic user segment instead of recognizing and optimizing for different users and their workflow requirements. For example, mach help lists 92 commands. I don't think any single person cares about all 92 of those commands. The average person may only care about 10 or even 20. In terms of user interface design, the features and workflow requirements of small user segments are polluting the interface for all users and making the entire experience complicated and difficult to reason about. As a concrete example, why should a system add-on developer or a Firefox Developer Tools developer (these people tend to care about testing a standalone Firefox add-on) care about Gecko's build system or tests? If you aren't touching Gecko or Firefox's chrome code, why should you be exposed to workflows and requirements that don't have a major impact on you? Or something more extreme, if you are developing a standalone Rust module or Python package in mozilla-central, why do you need to care about Firefox at all? (Yes, Firefox or another downstream consumer may care about changes to that standalone component and you can't ignore those dependencies. But it should at least be possible to hide those dependencies.)

Waving my hands, the solution to these problems is to treat Firefox development workflow as a product and to apply the same rigor that we use for actual Firefox product development. Give people with a vision for the entire workflow the ability to prioritize investment across tools and platforms. Give them a process for defining features that work across tools. Perform formal user studies. See how people are actually using the tools you build. Bring in design and user experience experts to help formulate better workflows. Perform user typing so different, segmentable workflows can be optimized for. Treat developers as you treat users of real products: listen to them. Give developers a voice to express frustrations. Let them tell you what they are trying to do and what they wish they could do. Integrate this feedback into a feature roadmap. Turn common feedback into action items for new features.

If you think these ideas are silly and it doesn't make sense to apply a product mindset to developer workflows and tooling, then you should be asking whether product management and all that it entails is also a silly idea. If you believe that aspects of product management have beneficial outcomes (which most companies do because otherwise there wouldn't be product managers), then why wouldn't you want to apply the methods of that discipline to developers and development workflows? Developers are users too and the fact that they work for the same company that is creating the product shouldn't make them immune from the benefits of product management.

If we want to make contributing to Firefox an even better experience for Mozilla employees and community contributors, I think we need to take a step back and assess the situation as a product manager would. The improvements that have been made to the individual pieces constituting Firefox's development workflow during my nearly seven years at Mozilla have been incredible. But I think in order to achieve the next round of major advancements in workflow productivity, we'll need to focus on how all of the pieces fit together. And that requires treating the entire workflow as a cohesive product.