Hunting the Shmoo

I first joined Mozilla as an intern in 2010 for the “Tools and Automation Team” (colloquially called the “A-Team”). I always had a bit of difficulty describing our role. We work on tests. But not the tests themselves, the the thing that runs the tests. Also we make sure the tests run when code lands. Also we have this dashboard to view results, oh and also we do a bunch of miscellaneous developer productivity kind of things. Oh and sometimes we have to do other operational type things as well, but it varies.

Over the years the team grew to a peak of around 25 people and the A-Team’s responsibilities expanded to include things like the build system, version control, review tools and more. Combined with Release Engineering (RelEng), this covered almost all of the software development pipeline. The A-Team was eventually split up into many smaller teams. Over time those smaller teams were re-org’ed, split up further, merged and renamed over and over again. Many labels were applied to the departments that tended to contain those teams. Labels like “Developer Productivity”, “Platform Operations”, “Product Integrity” and “Engineering Effectiveness”.

Interestingly, from 2010 to present, one label that has never been applied to any of these teams is “DevOps”.