Difference between revisions of "Contribute/Bugsquad"

Revision as of 13:54, 11 December 2007

The Bugsquad tries to keep track of bugs in KDE software and make sure that valid bugs are noticed by developers. You do not need any programming knowledge to be in the Bugsquad; it is simply a great way to give practical support to the KDE community if you are just starting out (or still relatively early) along the Programming Learning Curve (PLC).

How to help

Read the guide and join us for one of our bug weekends. We meet in IRC in channel #kde-bugs on irc.freenode.org. You can get started have your questions answered there. Even outside of weekends someone in IRC will usually be able to help you.

A summary of the Bugsquad guide is provided below to give you a quick idea of how you can help:

Confirming bugs. Bugs with the UNCONFIRMED status should get the NEW status once someone else is able to reproduce the bug reliably.
Finding bug duplicates. Many bugs entered into Bugzilla are duplicates of other bugs. Sometimes it's hard to recognize these as duplicates but multiple people checking can make the duplicates bubble to the top of the pile. The following remarks may help you identifying them:
- Using the Similar Bugs link to look if there are duplicates.
- In the case of crashes, use the link below the comment field to look for crash reports with the same backtrace. The backtrace must be in the body of the report in order to look for similar reports. This tool does not look in attachments with backtraces.
Close bugs which insufficient information and which are open for quite a long time (e.g. reporter does not respond on a need-more-info request). Usually a timeout of one month or more is considered to be an "information timeout".
Categorize bugs into the right components. Many bug reports can be further categorized to components; for example Konqueror reports can be assigned to khtml and kfm components.
Labelling bugs which contain testcases as such in the title. Ideally, testcases contain the minimal amount of code (HTML, scripts, C++ etc.) necessary to reproduce a bug.

Getting started

The sheer number of open issues can be overwhelming at the start. Here are some hints on getting started more smoothly:

Look at a single product at a time. For large applications (like e.g. konqueror), you may want to further limit your search to a particular component.
Don't try to find duplicates as the very first thing. Finding duplicates is hard until you have become familiar with the bugs in a component. Start out with UNCONFIRMED bugs as described above. That's valuable work, and a great way to familiarize yourself with the bug database.
Avoid very old bugs with many comments, and also bugs with many votes at the start. This may seem counter-intuitive, but in most cases these bugs are just too hard to deal with when getting started. If they were not hard, they probably would have been taken care of already. Revisit those later.
Don't be afraid to ask the reporter for more info. It's something you can even do without bugzilla permissions. And reporters will generally prefer being asked one question too many, instead of their report never being dealt with.

KDE4 Krush Days

Leading up to KDE 4.0 we are holding weekly issue identification and resolution days coordinated on #kde4-krush. We are keeping track of issues on these days on the KDE4 Krush Days page.

Bugs to be done

A temporary place we will use for bugs that need additional attention is the Bugs to be done page.

Articles

How to create useful crash reports - This article helps users to prepare their KDE packages such they can create detailed backtraces.

External links

Bug tracker

@@ Line 13: / Line 13: @@
 * Categorize bugs into the right components. Many bug reports can be further categorized to components; for example Konqueror reports can be assigned to khtml and kfm components.
 * Labelling bugs which contain testcases as such in the title. Ideally, testcases contain the minimal amount of code (HTML, scripts, C++ etc.) necessary to reproduce a bug.
+==Getting started==
+The sheer number of open issues can be overwhelming at the start. Here are some hints on getting started more smoothly:
+* Look at a single product at a time. For large applications (like e.g. konqueror), you may want to further limit your search to a particular component.
+* Don't try to find duplicates as the very first thing. Finding duplicates is hard until you have become familiar with the bugs in a component. Start out with UNCONFIRMED bugs as described above. That's valuable work, and a great way to familiarize yourself with the bug database.
+* Avoid very old bugs with many comments, and also bugs with many votes at the start. This may seem counter-intuitive, but in most cases these bugs are just too hard to deal with when getting started. If they were not hard, they probably would have been taken care of already. Revisit those later.
+* Don't be afraid to ask the reporter for more info. It's something you can even do without bugzilla permissions. And reporters will generally prefer being asked one question too many, instead of their report never being dealt with.
 ==KDE4 Krush Days==