Usability improvements for Firefox automation initiative - Status update #2

On this update, we will look at the progress made since our initial update.

A reminder that this quarter’s main focus is on:

• Debugging tests on interactive workers (only Linux on TaskCluster)
• Improve end to end times on Try (Thunder Try project)

For all bugs and priorities you can check out the project management page for it:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/EngineeringProductivity/Projects/Debugging_UX_improvements

Debugging tests on interactive workers

Tracking bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1262260

Accomplished recently:

• Bug 1285582 - Fixed Xvfb startup issue
• Bug 1288827 - Improved mochitest UX (no longer need --appname, paths normalized)
• Bug 1289879 - Uses mozharness venv if available

Upcoming:

• Support for smaller test harnesses (Cpp, Mn, wpt, etc)
• Improved one-click-loaner UX

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1285582

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1288827

[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1289879

Thunder Try - Improve end to end times on try

Project #1 - Artifact builds on automation

Tracking bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1284882

No news for this edition and probably the next one.

Project #2 - S3 Cloud Compiler Cache

Tracking bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280641

Accomplished recently:

• Working on testing sccache re-write on Try
• More news on following update

Project #3 - Metrics

Tracking bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1286856

Accomplished recently:

• Bug 1242017 - Metrics team will configure ingestion point into Telemetry

Upcoming:

• Bug 1258861 - Working on underlying data model at the moment:

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1242017

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1258861

Other

• Bug 1287604 - Experiment with different AWS instance types for TC linux64 builds
• Some initial experiments have shown we can shave 20 minutes off an average linux64 build by using more powerful AWS instances, with a reasonable cost tradeoff. We’ll start the work of migrating to these new instances soon.
• Bug 1272083 - Downloading and unzipping should be performed as data is received
• Project for investigation has been started: https://github.com/armenzg/download_and_unpack
• Bug 1286336 - Improve interaction of automation with version control
• Buildbot AMIs now seeded with mozilla-unified repo (Bug 1232442)
• TaskCluster decision and various lint/test tasks now use `hg robustcheckout` and share caches more optimally (Bug 1247168)
• Flake8 tasks now complete in as little as 9s (~3m before)
• Decision tasks now complete in <60s average="" font="" on="">
• Some TaskCluster tasks now share VCS checkouts on Try (Bug 1289643)
• Tasks will complete faster on Try due to not having to perform full VCS checkout

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1287604

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1272083

[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247168

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.