It’s been a whole year since my last BMO update, partly because I’ve been busy with MozReview (and blogging a lot about it), and partly because the BMO team got distracted from our goals by a few sudden priority changes, which I’ll get to later in this post.

Plans from 2014

Even with some large interruptions, we fully achieved three of our five goals for the year and made good progress on a fourth.

Alternative Bug Views

Have you tried out the new modal UI? Although not completely finished (it lacks a few features that the standard UI has), it’s very usable. I don’t remember the last time I had to switch back, and I’ve been using it for at least 6 months. Bonus: gone is the intermediate page when you change a bug’s product, a gripe from time immemorial!

Even though there are still a large number of controls, the new UI is a lot more streamlined. glob gave a brief presentation at a Mozilla Project Meeting in November if you’d like to learn more.

The part we haven’t yet undertaken is building on this new framework to provide alternate views of bug data depending on what the user is trying to accomplish. We want to experiment with stripping down the presented data to only what is needed for a particular task, e.g. developing, triaging, approving, etc. The new UI is a lot more flexible than the old, so in 2016 we’ll build out at least one new task-centric view.

GitHub Authentication

If you haven’t noticed, you can log into BMO via GitHub. If you’ve never used BMO before, you’ll be prompted to set up an account after authenticating. As with Persona, only users with no special privileges (i.e. not admins nor people in security groups) can log in via GitHub.

Auth Delegation

Originally designed to smooth the process of logging into Review Board, auth delegation for API keys is actually a general-use feature that greatly improves the user experience, not to mention security, of third-party apps by allowing them to delegate authentication to BMO. There’s now no reason for apps to directly ask for your BMO credentials!

MozReview Details

There’s now a panel just above the attachments table that shows all the MozReview commits associated with the displayed bug along with a bit of other info:

We’re currently sorting out a single method to display other relevant information, notably, status of reviews, and then we’ll add that to this table.

Improved Searchability

This is the big item we haven’t made much progress on. We’ve got a plan to mirror some data to an Elasticsearch cluster and wire it into Quick Search. We’ve even started on the implementation, but it’s not going to be ready until mid-2016. It will increase search speeds, understandably one of the more common complaints about BMO.

Curve balls

We had two sets of surprises in 2015. One was work that ended up consuming more time than we had expected, and the other was important work that suddenly got a big priority boost.

BMO Backup in AWS

The first is that we moved the BMO failover out of a data center in Phoenix and into the cloud. IT did most of the work, but we had to make a series of changes to BMO to facilitate the move. We also had a lot of testing to do to. The upside is that our new failover system has had more testing than our old one had for quite some time!

Hardened Security

In August we found out that an attacker had compromised a privileged BMO account, using a combination of a weak, reused password and an exploit in another web site. In addition to a huge forensics effort from the great security folks at Mozilla, the BMO team implemented a number of security enhancements to BMO, most notably two-factor authentication. This work naturally took high priority and is the main reason for the slippage of our big 2015 goals. Here’s to a more secure 2016!

Other Stuff

As usual, the BMO team rolled out a pile of smaller fixes, enhancements, improvements, and new features. A few notable examples include

• The guided bug-entry form got a nice refresh. This is the form that users without the editbugs permission, i.e. new users, see when entering bugs. You can always get to it via the “Switch to the Bugzilla helper” link at the buttom of the advanced bug-entry form. Note that if you’re an employee, you’ve been given editbugs by default, so you’ve likely never seen the guided form. Check it out—Bugzilla might be friendlier to new contributors than you expect.

• The platform settings for new bugs now default to all hardware and OSes, with a “Use my platform” button to easily set this to the reporter’s system parameters. This should help clear up some confusion between the reporter’s platform versus the platform the bug applies to.

• The ability to block requests for review, feedback, and needinfo.

• The preferences page is now better organized.

• HTML bugmail has microdata to make GMail display a “View bug” button. Thanks to Ed Morley for the patch!

You can always find the exhaustive list of recent changes to BMO on the wiki or on the mozilla.tools.bmo group/mailing list.