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10. März 2007

effective work with a bug reporting system

Again and again I stumble over people who seemingly don't understand how a bug reporting system is supposed to be used - usually that's Mozilla's Bugzilla in my case.

Those systems can work very well for reporting and working on bugs, and even though it could be improved (yes, all improvements I'd like are filed as bugs themselves), Bugzilla has grown into a really good such system over the years. To be honest, I've never professionally studied such technologies, and Bugzilla is the only one I know really well, but when you're working with it long enough and think about it, you begin to understand what this is all about.

One common mistake people are making is to go into a bug report that already has 50 or more comments and is pretty lengthy, and then they request some detail change in some part of the work that has already been done, reviewed and landed there. A recent comment in the "new SeaMonkey theme" bug doing exactly that is what leads me to write this blog entry. The correct solution to deal with such issues caused by a different bug (esp. if that one is a lengthy report already) is to file a new "followup" bug that covers exactly that one detailed issue you're seeing and mark this new bug dependent on the original one. Leaving a comment in the original bug can also help to get attention to the new issue, but that comment shouldn't be more than "I found a problem with X caused by this checkin, see bug XXXXXX" (Bugzilla is intelligent enough to link your mentioning of "bug XXXXXX" to the actual bug report).

Another common mistake is to add comments to the bug that don't add anything that wasn't already said there, esp. comments that just tell "I'm seeing this too" or "I want this fixed as well" or even "Adding myself to the CC list". "Me too" is only useful if you tell that you're seeing this on a configuration where it wasn't clear before that it is affected by the bug. If developers already know the cause for the problem or are convinced that this should be fixed, a "me too" comment just wastes their time - they need to read it and get no new information from that read, while they could use the same time to already actually work on a fix. You're probably distracting other people from work with such comments, keep that in mind.

I even believe that discussion of how some implementation should work in concept is usually wrong for a bug report. Bug reports should focus on explaining what exactly is the issue, finding out its root cause, and the actual fix (along with reviews of that fix). That's even true for feature requests. If the design of such a feature is unclear, this should be discussed in some place that allows to do this more in a real discussion style, allows easy editing of drafts, etc. Use a newsgroup, a wiki page, or both, or whatever fits this issue, link that from the bug, and come back to the bug when the discussion has settled on a specific approach.

So, actually, effective use of such a system comes down to:
  • Care that there's one bug report per specific issue, avoid the need for multiple patches/fixes in a single bug report.
  • If you want to track multiple or general issues, use a tracking bug for that (such a bug has multiple specific reports marked as dependencies and no specific work/fix/patch by itself)
  • Only add comments that add further information that helps to resolve the bug
  • Care that new people who look at the bug report can easily get informed of what the specific issue is and how far a fix has been progressed
  • File followup bugs for any derived specific issues, such as regressions, improvements to already passed (reviewed/checked in) fixes (unless you're very sure of a logical one-line-fix or that a backout is the only chance to fix the derived issue)
  • When filing new bugs, make sure that all information someone else (a developer) needs to fix this bug is there. If you're not sure what such a developer needs, describe the details of the problem you found (when/where/how it happened to you, what version of what software you were using for that, what you were doing in detail)
  • If a developer tells you to file a followup or take the discussion somewhere else, just do it - even if you don't understand why this may be a good idea. If you request a fix done by someone else, it's usually a good idea to also follow his requests that ease him working/helping on a fix. It's usually a good idea to add a comment on the bug that says "requested followup is bug XXXX" or "I opened a thread for this discussion at http://foo/bar" or "The requested draft is on the wiki at http://foo/wiki/bar". Helping developers by following their requests can magically speed up fixing :)

I'm sure this set of common mistakes and guidelines is incomplete, but I think if you follow this advice, working with Bugzilla and other bug reporting systems will not only be more fun for everyone, but also will make fixes appear faster as developers can be more foused to specific working tasks.

Von KaiRo, um 15:58 | Tags: Bugzilla, Mozilla | 1 Kommentar | TrackBack: 0

It's all about the planets...

Blogging life in many areas, especially in OSS developer communities like GNOME, KDE or Mozilla sometimes seems to actually orbit around planets, which are basically website feed aggregators that collect blogs from the whole community and show their entries at a single place. This way, you can read or watch one single site/feed and get a glimpse of information from the whole community.

Planet Mozilla is just such a site, and there has been some discussion recently about its administration, with the outcome that Asa is probably owning it now, a new set of peers for that administration has been decided, and we'll end up with this main planet site having the full range of all blog entries of "active Mozilla Community members" and a second feed that only has their Mozilla-related entries. Asa is doing a great job there, and despite of some differences of opinion I may with him from time to time, I'm glad he's taking care of that now.
Additionally, for all of us who are in the L10n community, there's another planet page up on the new L10n server, named as Planet Mozilla L10N.
I'll try to get this blog aggegrated on those planets, at least as soon as I have tag support here and can filter feeds for those where required (L10n, future Mozilla-related-only planet).

In other planetary news, I'm still a bit sad that the next Space Shuttle launch to our home planet's orbit has been pushed out due to damage caused by a hail storm and now can only take place after the ISS crew changeover from Expedition 14 to Expedition 15, which means I have to wait until at least late April to see another hopefully great Station construction mission. I hope they get the second half of P6 solar panels retracted more easily than the first half back on the STS-116 mission last December.

But until STS-117 goes out into orbit, I'll keep hoping their preparations go well and stick to those planets down here... ;-)

Von KaiRo, um 03:10 | Tags: ISS, L10n, Mozilla, NASA, Planet, Shuttle, Space | keine Kommentare | TrackBack: 0

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