Difference between revisions of "Contribute/Bugsquad/Quick Introduction to Bugzilla"

Revision as of 14:49, 16 December 2009

Bugzilla is the bug tracking software the KDE community uses to handle the bug reports of their applications.

Our bugtracker is located at https://bugs.kde.org

Main screen of the bugtracker (default style):

Fields of a bug report

Summary: Brief description of the bug

Product: Application or library which is being affected by the bug

Component: Specific component inside the product which is being affected by the bug

Version: Version of the application or library which shows the bug (Note: different products could have different policies about this field: it could represent the last version in which the bug is present, or the first version in which the bug appeared). This field defaults to "unspecified".

Priority: Priority of the bug report. It defaults to "NOR"(normal) and it must not be changed.

Severity: Type of bug:

• "Crash": a bug that causes the application to close itself or freeze/hang
• "Normal": a non-crash bug report (misbehavior)
• "Minor": a non-crash bug which is not really important (a little detail)
• "Wishlist": a feature request

Status: Status of the bug report:

• "UNCONFIRMED": the issue was not confirmed by other bug reporters or developers
• "NEW": the issue was confirmed by other bug reporters or contributors
• "ASSIGNED": a developer/user is working to fix it
• "NEEDSINFO": the issue was closed because it is lacking information
• "RESOLVED": the issue was closed because of different motives:
  • "FIXED": the bug was fixed by developers/contributors
  • "WORKSFORME": the bug cannot be reproduced and it is considered fixed
  • "WONTFIX": the bug is not going to be fixed (developers policy)
  • "UPSTREAM/DOWNSTREAM": the bug was not related to KDE (problems related to installation and distributions or to external libraries or plugins)
  • "INVALID": the described issue was not a real bug (intended behavior or installation problems)
  • "DUPLICATE": the bug was already reported

Votes: Current number of votes the bug report has. Votes can be useful to confirm a bug (status changes from UNCONFIRMED to NEW).

Comments: The first comment is always the original description of the bug sent by the reporter. The other ones could be comments added by the same reporter or by any other user, a bug triager, or a developer.

Keywords: Special words which are used to mark special reports, in order to find them easily.

CC List: List of mail addresses (from reporters or contributors) who are tracking the bug report and who are going to get a mail notification about every change on it.

More information about bug report's life cycle and other fields can be found at https://bugs.kde.org/page.cgi?id=fields.html

Common Operations

Get a description of the products and components

You can properly identify each KDE application with its bugzilla product component using this feature: Describe components

Searching bug reports

Simple Search

The simple search provides a quick way to look for bug reports without the need to specify too much specific fields filters.

Simple Search URL

In the Status field you can select:

• Open: bug reports which are currently active, unfixed or untested
• Closed: bug reports which are not active, fixed, invalid, unreproducible
• All: both open and closed bug reports

In the Product field you select the main application or library suffering the bug

In the Words field you can enter some keywords which will be used to identify the bug report (it will search trying to match those words with the Summary of the report) You can use keywords or a complete phrase You can also leave this field empty to look for all the bug reports

Example

Search for currently active Plasma bug reports about icons being misplaced on login.

* Status: "Open"
* Product: "Plasma"
* Words: "icon move login" or "icons are randomly moved during the startup"

Advanced Search

This kind of search allows the user to filter a lot of fields using several combinations.

Advanced Search URL

The important field in this form are:

• Summary: words to match on the summary of the bug report (it could be "all the words" or "any word"). You can leave this field empty to not filter the summary (shows all the reports)
• Product and Component to filter the main application/library and component suffering the bug (the Component field defaults to "general")
• A Comment: words to match on the full description (or comments) of the bug report (it could be "all the words" or "any word"). This field is really useful as the full description will have more information than a Summary. You can leave this field empty to not filter the comments (shows all the reports)
• Status. This field defaults to the "Opened" statuses.
• Severity to filter the type of bug

You can setup a date delimiter using the "Bug Changes" group: you can set two dates and select a field to compare: "Bug creation", "Last modification", and so on. The dates' format can be "YYYY-MM-DD", "Xd" (X days), "Xm" (X months), "Now" (Today)

You can filter reports which are assigned or have comments of a specific user using the "Email address, bug number and votes" group.

You can also select the sort method to use: by bug number, by importance, by last order used.

Fields which could remain untouched (as they are not really useful to filter out. And we don't use some of them): "Target", "The URL", "Keywords", "Priority", "Hardware", "OS"

Example

Search for bugs in the folderview widget (Plasma-desktop) related to the preview of images not working on a network share, currently opened and confirmed:

* Summary: "preview fail" or "preview not working"
* Product: "plasma"
* Component: "widget-folderview"
* A Comment: "network" or "network share" or "remote"
* Status: "NEW", "ASSIGNED" and "REOPENED"
* Severity: "minor" and "normal" (it is not a crash and it is not a major bug)

Search Results

With the default style you can easily recognize the different type of bug reports by colors (red are crashes, yellow are normal reports and green are feature requests)

• To access any bug report listed you need to click its report ID
• You can customize the columns you want to show for each bug report in the list using the option "Change Columns" below.

Searching Hints

• Use common words and try several times with different combinations: as bug reports are written by humans (most of the times), there could be several ways to describe the same problem. If you choose the proper and common words, and you try several times with different combinations of those, you ensure to have matching results.

• Do not use too much filters the first time you look for something: If you do it, you may lose some valuable results which could be related to your search. Increase the level of filtering once you have a lot of results, to try to increase the accuracy.

• Search using date range delimiter: most of the bug reports are recent, so you can try to increase the search speed using date delimiters. Example: search from "2009-01-01" to "Now", if you don't find results, search from "2008-01-01" to "2009-01-01". This way you reduce the bugzilla server load.

Adding comments

Adding comments to a bug report

[Screenshot]

Modifying status of a bug report (permissions required)

Modifying some of the fields of a bug report

[Screenshot]

Customizing your bugzilla account

Configure your bugzilla account look and feel

[Screenshot]

General Tips

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