Bug hunting
Contents |
Presentation
A bug is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, fault or “undocumented feature” in a computer program that prevents it from behaving as intended (e.g., producing an incorrect result).
If a software you used is crashing, freezing, or just acting in an unwanted way, it is probably a bug.
As an open source community, you can help Mozilla correct bugs in its softwares.
Overview
Mozilla project is centralized around operational center tool - Bugzilla. The tool is used for storing all kinds of tasks that we work on as a project. It means not only problems, but also new features, minor style changes, new theme requests, new account requests, localization topics etc.
Bugzilla is not a thing anyone can fully control. In the system we have over 400 thousands singular tasks of different type, in different state and of different priority. It means chaos. The good thing is that the system is also a place where everyone involved in Mozilla project cooperates and it ensures that beside extreme cases (like security or law) each community members is equal, no matter if he's a long time Mozilla developer or a new contributor.
Because of that, we consider Bugzilla to be a great start for everyone to learn how the project looks like, what is the project culture and how you can help. If you're interested in how Mozilla looks like and works, bug hunting community gives you a great opportunity to scale your contribution and learn until you find the best element of our eco system you want to work on.
Roles
There are several types of tasks in Bugzilla:
- bug hunter is a person who is using a testing compilation of the product to seek for any problems that are potentially unknown to developers and reports them.
- improving report quality. Many reporters lack skills and report bugs that are hard to reproduce, identify and fix. To reduce the time the developer has to spend to analyze the problem, you can help reporter raising the cleanness of the report. This will also increase the chance for the bug to get fixed soon.
- scanning bugzilla for potentially important bugs and raising their priority by cleaning the quality of the report and pointing the bug to developers working in the area the bug is about.
- sorting recent bugs. You can scan bugs reported in the recent hours and ensure they're not duplicates of another bug, they're properly described
- writing testcases. Many bugs lacks easy to reproduce testcases that would reproduce the problem while being small and simple. People report a problem with some website and the website is a very complex structure that is hard to analyze. You can limit the time the developer has to spend on it by preparing a minimized website that still reproduces the bug.
- verifying patches. You can seek for recently fixed bugs, download tester build and see if the bug was fixed indeed.
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