Our support platform went through numerous changes and transitions during the last couple of years. With the SUMO team joining efforts with the Open Innovation group last year, we have started thinking about different approaches to our support platform strategy. Our support platform is complex and there are a lot of legacy items that need to be taken care of. Besides this we need to get ready for all the new things that are coming our way.
We want to ensure we’re providing a stable platform that will support Mozilla in the years to come as well as manage all the new products and changes expected in the following years.
During this first half of the year we have worked on setting up a roadmap that prioritizes the work and helps us be more intentional about the changes we want to make in order to provide the best support platform for our users. With this we have also worked on new processes that will hopefully simplify the way we work with the platform as well as the overall development process.
What’s new
Our current efforts are focused almost 100% on the integration of Firefox Accounts. In parallel we’ve also been working with the IT team to complete a migration of the infrastructure to a new instance of AWS (this has been completed on June 5th). Firefox Accounts implementation will follow shortly. After these major pieces of work are done our next big priorities are: Elastic search upgrades, ongoing UX experiments and a Responsive Design implementation that has become even more important as Google now indexes our site as mobile-first..
There will be more discussions about H2 and how we’re going to manage platform priorities in the second half of the year in July.
You can consult the current platform roadmap here.
This is a high-level overview on each project we’re working on and the expected timeline for completion. We’re going to review the roadmap items at the beginning of each month.
All the development work is being tracked in sprints and you can follow our current sprint here.
As mentioned before, the SUMO platform is a large complex platform with a lot of legacy issues that need to be dealt with. Currently we have around 700 bugs filed, many of them being more than 5 years old. As we don’t have enough resources to deal with this huge backlog we’ll need to change a few processes. We have designed a new triage and roadmap review process that you can read about here . Bugs that are not critical to the stability of the platform and are older than 6 months will be closed – this is a one time only event and we expect this to take care of most outdated bugs that will never be fixed. Feel free to open a new bug if you feel the issue is urgent or should be prioritized nonetheless.
Please note
We’re currently focusing on: Firefox Accounts implementation, the IT migration as well as any critical issues that break the site or block releases. Any other items are currently on hold. We can prioritize other issues as needed as per the process described in the document shared above.
SUMO staff team