Archive for July, 2007

Recent Thunderbird Discussions

Monday, July 30th, 2007

There has been a lot of discussion about the future of Thunderbird as a result of Mitchell’s blog post and Scott’s subsequent post. I hope that presenting some additional information might help focus the discussion.

Scott and I started work on Thunderbird in the spring of 2003. With the subsequent formation of the Mozilla Foundation that summer, Thunderbird become a more focused part of the project along with Firefox. Scott was one of the first three or four Mozilla Foundation employees; I was hired as a contractor for a couple months and came on full-time in January of 2004. We have been Team Thunderbird at the Mozilla Foundation and then Corporation, ever since.

Given this small team size, we would not have been able to ship Thunderbird without a tremendous amount of work by volunteers. For example, our themes and localizations are all done by volunteers. Here are some stats about our community:

Developer Community

  • 2 Full Time Mail developers (David and Scott)
  • ~ 12 active mail developer volunteers (including Seamonkey Mail contributors)
  • 4 Thunderbird front end peers & module owners
  • over 35 localizations done entirely by volunteers
  • 8 back end peers & module owners.
  • Over the last six months, 56% of the mail patches originated from community members
  • 93 different developers contributed at least one patch over that period.

    • Very active QA and Support Communities (bugzilla, MozillaZine, etc).

  • ~ 5 active QA volunteers who actively help triage and manage Thunderbird specific bugs in bugzilla
  • 2,500 Nightly Thunderbird Build QA Volunteers (very active posting feedback in the forums)
  • 40,000 daily Beta testers
  • Over 400 extensions hosted on add-ons

    • Some of the discussion comments have been along the lines of “Why doesn’t Thunderbird do X, Y, and Z?” so I thought it might be helpful to talk a little about how my time was spent during the 2.0 release cycle:

  • non-coding activities - 50%
  • bug fixing - 40%
  • new features - 10%

    • Non-coding activities include things like project planning, project management, code reviews, helping contributors, helping extension writers, and supporting users. Scott’s breakdown would probably look similar, except that he spends a lot more time on project & release management fun than I do, the lucky fellow!

    Given Thunderbird’s staffing level, I feel that it’s critical I allocate my time in such a way as to get the highest leverage for the project. My hope is that there’s a lot of leverage in helping contributors and extension writers, so I try to spend as much time as possible doing that. We work together with our QA volunteers and users to figure out which bugs to fix. For new features, we have to concentrate on things that have a relatively big bang for the buck, that we can do relatively quickly, and that leverage our existing infrastructure.

    Opinions always vary on how time should be allocated, but I have to balance a lot of competing needs. I’m interested to hear what other folks think.

    - David

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