Hi everyone, We’re making a release process change to reduce end-of-cycle friction in Nightly and make better use of the Beta stabilization window: the Nightly soft code freeze at the end of each cycle is being removed, and we’re adjusting the Beta build schedule to preserve (and improve) our ability to assess train quality and stabilize before Beta reaches users.
Why we’re changing this We’ve received feedback that over time, the “soft freeze” has been treated much more strictly than intended, and the uncertainty around when it starts/ends has led to hesitation in landing patches both late in a cycle and early in the next one. That translates into avoidable delays and lost cycle time. Separately, the current Beta cadence leaves limited time for meaningful rollout and uplifts early in the cycle (i.e. Beta 1 → Beta 2 happens quickly), and RC week often underutilizes the available window for fixes. What’s changing Policy change - No more Nightly soft code freeze at the end of the Nightly cycle. Landings remain subject to the usual quality expectations, however. - No changes to other Nightly milestones (e.g., QA or localization). Beta schedule change (high level) - Beta 1 shipping shifts later by ~1 day: we will build and ship Beta 1 on Wednesday of week 1 instead of starting rollout Tuesday. We will proactively revert patches from Beta which cause quality issues or otherwise delay shipping Beta 1 on time. - We’ll add an additional Beta 10 build late in the cycle (week 4) before creating RC builds. - With the added late Beta build, RC builds will no longer be shipped to the Beta channel (they’ll be functionally equivalent to the final Beta), simplifying RC week and related workflows. These changes also apply to Firefox for Android. For a visual guide to what’s changing, this table <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1I088QIsDEC6ljKdlWAi6v__YcOFNqSacp60EObcJMKk/edit?usp=sharing> shows a side-by-side comparison of the schedule before and after. The various release calendars are being updated to reflect this change. If you have questions or edge cases you’re worried about (large/risky landings, release automation sensitivities, etc.), please reach out to Release Management on Slack in #release-coordination. Thanks for helping us make the cycle smoother and more predictable! Ryan VanderMeulen Firefox Release Manager -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "[email protected]" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/d/msgid/dev-platform/CAPebk9fQe5Z1Npx5MpiNLc-Nf%3DYOrGSzhkdKx9Xyi-ZV53-9ug%40mail.gmail.com.
