John O’Duinn, Director of Release Engineering at Mozilla kicked off ICSE 2013 with his keynote – Release Engineering as a Force Multiplier. The build and release process used to be a pain point at Mozilla, but now makes the company and community more productive as a whole.
John describes details on how the team added support for concurrent development, rethought continuous integration and increased capacity by moving to a hybrid-cloud build infrastructure. These changes improved several aspects of the business, including switching to a rapid release model and reducing turnaround time on a release from weeks to hours. As a result, Mozilla improved its abilities against much bigger and better funded competitors in the marketplace while also allowing them to enter new markets and help ensure its long-term success.