Categories: developers sdk

Introducing the Fast Track review queue

Since we overhauled our review process earlier this year, we have had three review queues: full review nominations, full review updates and preliminary reviews (nominations and updates in a single queue). With this we struck a difficult but important balance: ensuring that all add-ons listed on AMO have at least been checked for potential security problems, and at the same time giving developers the freedom to list their experimental, niche or unfinished add-ons as quickly as possible.

A team of hard-working volunteers spend their spare time reviewing all add-ons in these queues, and their efforts can be seen in the updates I post in this blog. Since not all add-on reviews are equal, we have some features in our review tools that allow reviewers to identify the items in the queues that can be done quickly. The Fast Track queue is the newest of these features.

Add-ons created with the Add-ons SDK are generally very easy to review, since for the most part they have little code and use predetermined and tested APIs provided by the SDK. The Fast Track queue now lists all SDK add-ons pending review that don’t break out of their sandbox (that is, that don’t use require(“chrome”)). Reviewers can now be more efficient, easily taking care of quick reviews that don’t require much attention.

We’re looking into adding other review classes into the Fast Track queue in the future. This is a valuable tool that enables us to better prioritize our work and reduce review waiting times for all add-on developers.

2 comments on “Introducing the Fast Track review queue”

  1. Sakul wrote on

    what about giving add-ons with a lot of user a fast-track? or loyal add-on developer?
    https://twitter.com/#!/lukasoni/status/149479367779692544

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      Usage is easily measurable, but I don’t think it would benefit them to put the add-on in the Fast Track queue. The most popular add-ons tend to be the most complex, and therefore only a few experienced reviewers can look at them. We already have a way to them to contact us in case they have urgent reviews, so I think we have covered those cases fairly well.

      Loyalty is harder to measure. I’m not even sure how you would define loyalty within this system. Any ideas?