Bugzilla – A Bug Tracking Tool

• Introduction

– What is Bugzilla?

– Who is using Bugzilla?

• Before entering a bug

• How to enter a useful bug report into Bugzilla

• Bug life-cycle

• Querying existing bug reports

• In this course students are allowed to ...

• Bugzilla advanced features

What is Bugzilla?

• Bugzilla is a bug- or issue-tracking system. – Bug-tracking systems allow individual or groups of developers effectively

to keep track of outstanding problems with their product. • An Open Source product

– covered by the Mozilla Public License• Written in Perl, uses MySQL database• ”De-facto standard defect-tracking system against which all others are

measured”• See: http://www.bugzilla.org

Who is using Bugzilla?

• Netscape/AOL• Mozilla.org• NASA• Red Hat Software• SuSe Corp• The Horde Project• AbiSource• Real Time Enterprises, Inc• Eggheads.org• Strata Software

• RockLinux

• Creative Labs (makers of SoundBlaster)

• The Apache Foundation

• The Gnome Foundation

• Ximian

• Linux-Mandrake

Before entering a bug

• Make sure the bug has not been previously reported!

– Use the Bugzilla Query Form

– For more information, see the tutorial of how to find reported bugs.

• Next, be sure that you've reproduced your bug using the latest build released

– Ddevelopment process may produce new builds even daily, and the bug you've found may already have been fixed.

A useful bug report has two qualities

1. Reproducible If an engineer can't see it or conclusively prove that it exists, the engineer

will probably stamp it "WORKSFORME" or "INVALID", and move on to the next bug. Every relevant detail you can provide helps.

2. Specific The quicker the engineer can isolate the issue to a specific problem, the

more likely it'll be expediently fixed. If a programmer or tester has to decipher a bug, they may spend more

time cursing the submitter than solving the problem In testing WWW pages, try to isolate what on the page is triggering the

crash, and include it as an HTML snippet in the bug report if possible.

A useful bug report

• Useful bug reports are ones that get bugs fixed!

• Be non-judgmental in reporting bugs.

– Bug reports need to be non-judgmental, non-personal and non-inflammatory.

– Reports should be written against the product, not the person, and state only the facts.

Getting started – Creating A Bug Report

• From the Bugzilla main page, choose "Enter a new bug report".

• If you haven't logged into Bugzilla already, you'll need to enter your email address, password, and press the "Login" button.

– Userid is your e-mail address (in most cases, your HUT unix account name + @cc.hut.fi)

– Password is the same as in the course return system

Where did you find the bug?

How important is the bug?

Who will be following up on the bug?