Lando is so close now that I can practically smell the tibanna. Israel put together a quick demo of Phabricator/BMO/Lando/hg running on his local system, which is only a few patches away from being a deployed reality. One caveat: this demo uses Phabricator’s web UI to post the patch. We highly recommend using Arcanist, Phabricator’s command-line tool, to submit patches instead, mainly because it preserves all the relevant changeset metadata....

There is a strong argument in modern software engineering that a sequence of smaller changes is preferable to a single large change. This approach facilitates development (easier to debug, quicker to land), testing (less functionality to verify at once), reviews (less code to keep in the reviewer’s head), and archaeology (annotations are easier to follow). Recommended limits are in the realm of 300-400 changed lines of code per patch (see, for example, the great article “How to Do Code Reviews Like a Human (Part Two)”)....

With work on Phabricator–BMO integration wrapping up, the development team’s focus has switched to the new automatic-landing service that will work with Phabricator. The new system is called “Lando” and functions somewhat similarly to MozReview–Autoland, with the biggest difference being that it is a standalone web application, not tightly integrated with Phabricator. This gives us much more flexibility and allows us to develop more quickly, since working within extension systems is often painful for anything nontrivial....

As the manager responsible for driving the decision and process behind the move to Phabricator at Mozilla, I’ve been asked to write about my recent experiences, including how this decision was implemented, what worked well, and what I might have done differently. I also have a few thoughts about decision making both generally and at Mozilla specifically. Please note that these thoughts reflect only my personal opinions. They are not a pronouncement of how decision making is or will be done at Mozilla, although I hope that my account and ideas will be useful as we continue to define and shape processes, many of which are still raw years after we became an organization with more than a thousand employees, not to mention the vast number of volunteers....

tl;dr Development Phabricator instance is up at https://mozphab.dev.mozaws.net/, authenticated via bugzilla-dev.allizom.org. Development, read-only UI for Lando (the new automatic-landing service) has been deployed. Work is proceeding on matching viewing restrictions on Phabricator revisions (review requests) to associated confidential bugs. Work is proceeding on the internals of Lando to land Phabricator revisions to the autoland Mercurial branch. Pre-release of Phabricator, without Lando, targeted for mid-August. General release of Phabricator and Lando targeted for late September or early October....

As with MozReview, Conduit is being designed to operate on changesets. Since the end result of work on a codebase is a changeset, it makes sense to start the process with one, so all the necessary metadata (author, message, repository, etc.) are provided from the beginning. You can always get a plain diff from a changeset, but you can’t get a changeset from a plain diff. Similarly, we’re keeping the concept of a logical series of changesets....

For background on Conduit, please see the previous post and the Intent to Implement. Autoland We kicked off Conduit work in January starting with the new Autoland service. Right now, much of the Autoland functionality is located in the MozReview Review Board extension: the permissions model, the rewriting of commit messages to reflect the reviewers, and the user interface. The only part that is currently logically separate is the “transplant service”, which actually takes commits from one repo (e....

In 2017, Engineering Productivity is starting on a new project that we’re calling “Conduit”, which will improve the automation around submitting, testing, reviewing, and landing commits. In many ways, Conduit is an evolution and course correction of the work on MozReview we’ve done in the last couple years. Before I get into what Conduit is exactly, I want to first clarify that the MozReview team has not really been working on a review tool per se, aside from some customizations requested by users (line support for inline diff comments)....

Stuff that landed in 2016 Here’s a sampling of improvements to BMO that were launched in 2016. Improvements to bug-modal We’ve continued to refine the modal bug view, aka the “experimental UI”. The BMO team fixed 39 bugs relating to the new interface in 2016. We’ve got a couple more blockers before we make the modal view the default, which should happen in the middle of January. We know there are a still a few outstanding bugs and some missing functionality, so we will leave the standard view available for a little while, at least until all the blockers of bug 1273046 are resolved....

In Q3 the MozReview team started to focus on tackling various usability issues. We started off with a targetted effort on the “Finish Review” dialog, which was not only visually unappealing but difficult to use. The talented David Walsh compressed the nearly full-screen dialog into a dropdown expanded from the draft banner, and he changed button names to clarify their purpose. We have some ideas for further improvements as well....