What, Why, How, & Where?

Bugzilla is one example of a class of programs called "Defect Tracking Systems", or, more commonly, "Bug-Tracking Systems". Defect Tracking Systems allow individual or groups of developers to keep track of outstanding bugs in their product effectively. Bugzilla was originally written by Terry Weissman in a programming language called "TCL", to replace a crappy bug-tracking database used internally for Netscape Communications. Terry later ported Bugzilla to Perl from TCL, and in Perl it remains to this day. Most commercial defect-tracking software vendors at the time charged enormous licensing fees, and Bugzilla quickly became a favorite of the open-source crowd (with its genesis in the open-source browser project, Mozilla). It is now the de-facto standard defect-tracking system against which all others are measured. Bugzilla has matured immensely, and now boasts many advanced features. These include: integrated, product-based granular security schema inter-bug dependencies and dependency graphing advanced reporting capabilities a robust, stable RDBMS back-end extensive configurability a very well-understood and well-thought-out natural bug resolution protocol email, XML, console, and HTTP APIs available integration with automated software configuration management systems, including Perforce and CVS (through the Bugzilla email interface and checkin/checkout scripts) too many more features to list Despite its current robustness and popularity, Bugzilla faces some near-term challenges, such as reliance on a single database, a lack of abstraction of the user interface and program logic, verbose email bug notifications, a powerful but daunting query interface, little reporting configurability, problems with extremely large queries, some unsupportable bug resolution options, little internationalization (although non-US character sets are accepted for comments), and dependence on some nonstandard libraries. Some recent headway has been made on the query front, however. If you are using the latest version of Bugzilla, you should see a simple search form on the default front page of your Bugzilla install. Type in two or three search terms and you should pull up some relevant information. This is also available as "queryhelp.cgi". Despite these small problems, Bugzilla is very hard to beat. It is under very active development to address the current issues, and continually gains new features.

No, Who's on first... For many years, defect-tracking software has remained principally the domain of large software development houses. Even then, most shops never bothered with bug-tracking software, and instead simply relied on shared lists and email to monitor the status of defects. This procedure is error-prone and tends to cause those bugs judged least significant by developers to be dropped or ignored. These days, many companies are finding that integrated defect-tracking systems reduce downtime, increase productivity, and raise customer satisfaction with their systems. Along with full disclosure, an open bug-tracker allows manufacturers to keep in touch with their clients and resellers, to communicate about problems effectively throughout the data management chain. Many corporations have also discovered that defect-tracking helps reduce costs by providing IT support accountability, telephone support knowledge bases, and a common, well-understood system for accounting for unusual system or software issues. But why should you use Bugzilla? Bugzilla is very adaptable to various situations. Known uses currently include IT support queues, Systems Administration deployment management, chip design and development problem tracking (both pre-and-post fabrication), and software and hardware bug tracking for luminaries such as Redhat, Loki software, Linux-Mandrake, and VA Systems. Combined with systems such as CVS, Bonsai, or Perforce SCM, Bugzilla provides a powerful, easy-to-use solution to configuration management and replication problems Bugzilla can dramatically increase the productivity and accountability of individual employees by providing a documented workflow and positive feedback for good performance. How many times do you wake up in the morning, remembering that you were supposed to do something today, but you just can't quite remember? Put it in Bugzilla, and you have a record of it from which you can extrapolate milestones, predict product versions for integration, and by using Bugzilla's e-mail integration features be able to follow the discussion trail that led to critical decisions. Ultimately, Bugzilla puts the power in your hands to improve your value to your employer or business while providing a usable framework for your natural attention to detail and knowledge store to flourish.

Hey! I'm Woody! Howdy, Howdy, Howdy! Bugzilla is a large, complex system. Describing how to use it requires some time. If you are only interested in installing or administering a Bugzilla installation, please consult the Installing and Administering Bugzilla portions of this Guide. This section is principally aimed towards developing end-user mastery of Bugzilla, so you may fully enjoy the benefits afforded by using this reliable open-source bug-tracking software. Throughout this portion of the Guide, we will refer to user account options available at the Bugzilla test installation, landfill.tequilarista.org. Some people have run into difficulties completing this tutorial. If you run into problems, please check the updated online documentation available at http://www.trilobyte.net/barnsons. If you're still stumped, please subscribe to the newsgroup and provide details of exactly what's stumping you! If enough people complain, I'll have to fix it in the next version of this Guide. You can subscribe to the newsgroup at news://news.mozilla.org/netscape.public.mozilla.webtools Although Landfill serves as a great introduction to Bugzilla, it does not offer all the options you would have as a user on your own installation of Bugzilla, nor can it do more than serve as a general introduction to Bugzilla. Additionally, Landfill often runs cutting-edge versions of Bugzilla for testing, so some things may work slightly differently than mentioned here.

First things first! If you want to use Bugzilla, first you need to create an account. Consult with the administrator responsible for your installation of Bugzilla for the URL you should use to access it. If you're test-driving the end-user Bugzilla experience, use this URL: http://landfill.tequilarista.org/bugzilla-tip/ Click the "Open a new Bugzilla account" link. Enter your "E-mail address" and "Real Name" (or whatever name you want to call yourself) in the spaces provided, then select the "Create Account" button. Within moments, you should receive an email to the address you provided above, which contains your login name (generally the same as the email address), and a password you can use to access your account. This password is randomly generated, and should be changed at your nearest opportunity (we'll go into how to do it later). Click the Log In link in the yellow area at the bottom of the page in your browser, then enter your E-mail address and Password you just received into the spaces provided, and select Login. If you ever forget your password, you can come back to this page, enter your E-mail address, then select the E-mail me a password button to have your password mailed to you again so that you can login. Many modern browsers include an Auto-Complete or Form Fill feature to remember the user names and passwords you type in at many sites. Unfortunately, sometimes they attempt to guess what you will put in as your password, and guess wrong. If you notice a text box is already filled out, please overwrite the contents of the text box so you can be sure to input the correct information. Congratulations! If you followed these directions, you now are the proud owner of a user account on landfill.tequilarista.org (Landfill) or your local Bugzilla install. You should now see in your browser a page called the Bugzilla Query Page. It may look daunting, but with this Guide to walk you through it, you will master it in no time.

The Bugzilla Query Page is the heart and soul of the Bugzilla user experience. It is the master interface where you can find any bug report, comment, or patch currently in the Bugzilla system. We'll go into how to create your own bug report later on. There are efforts underway to simplify query usage. If you have a local installation of Bugzilla 2.12 or higher, you should have quicksearch.html available to use and simplify your searches. There is also a helper for the query interface, called queryhelp.cgi. Landfill tends to run the latest code, so these two utilities should be available there for your perusal. At this point, please visit the main Bugzilla site, bugzilla.mozilla.org, to see a more fleshed-out query page. The first thing you need to notice about the Bugzilla Query Page is that nearly every box you see on your screen has a hyperlink nearby, explaining what it is or what it does. Near the upper-left-hand corner of your browser window you should see the word Status underlined. Select it. Notice the page that popped up? Every underlined word you see on your screen is a hyperlink that will take you to context-sensitive help. Click around for a while, and learn what everything here does. To return to the query interface after pulling up a help page, use the Back button in your browser. I'm sure that after checking out the online help, you are now an expert on the Bugzilla Query Page. If, however, you feel you haven't mastered it yet, let me walk you through making a few successful queries to find out what there are in the Bugzilla bug-tracking system itself. Ensure you are back on the Bugzilla Query Page. Do nothing in the boxes marked "Status", "Resolution", "Platform", "OpSys", "Priority", or "Severity". The default query for "Status" is to find all bugs that are NEW, ASSIGNED, or REOPENED, which is what we want. If you don't select anything in the other 5 scrollboxes there, then you are saying that "any of these are OK"; we're not locking ourselves into only finding bugs on the "DEC" Platform, or "Windows 95" OpSys (Operating System). You're smart, I think you have it figured out. Basically, selecting anything on the query page narrows your search down. Leaving stuff unselected, or text boxes unfilled, broadens your search. You see the box immediately below the top six boxes that contains an "Email" text box, with the words "matching as", a drop-down selection box, then some checkboxes with "Assigned To" checked by default? This allows you to filter your search down based upon email address. Let's put my email address in there, and see what happens. Type "barnboy@trilobyte.net" in the top Email text box. Let's narrow the search some more. Scroll down until you find the box with the word "Program" over the top of it. This is where we can narrow our search down to only specific products (software programs or product lines) in our Bugzilla database. Please notice the box is a scrollbox. Using the down arrow on the scrollbox, scroll down until you can see an entry called "Bugzilla". Select this entry. Did you notice that some of the boxes to the right changed when you selected "Bugzilla"? Every Program (or Product) has different Versions, Components, and Target Milestones associated with it. A "Version" is the number of a software program. Do you remember the hype in 1995 when Microsoft Windows 95(r) was released? It may have been several years ago, but Microsoft(tm) spent over $300 Million advertising this new Version of their software. Three years later, they released Microsoft Windows 98(r), another new version, to great fanfare, and then in 2000 quietly released Microsoft Windows ME(Millenium Edition)(r). Software "Versions" help a manufacturer differentiate their current product from their previous products. Most do not identify their products by the year they were released. Instead, the "original" version of their software will often be numbered "1.0", with small bug-fix releases on subsequent tenths of a digit. In most cases, it's not a decimal number; for instance, often 1.9 is an older version of the software than 1.11, but is a newer version than 1.1.1. In general, a "Version" in Bugzilla should refer to released products, not products that have not yet been released to the public. Forthcoming products are what the Target Milestone field is for. A "Component" is a piece of a Product. It may be a standalone program, or some other logical division of a Product or Program. Normally, a Component has a single Owner, who is responsible for overseeing efforts to improve that Component. Mozilla's "Bugzilla" Product is composed of several pieces (Components): Administration, Administration of a bugzilla installation, including editcomponents.cgi, editgroups.cgi, editkeywords.cgi, editparams.cgi, editproducts.cgi, editusers.cgi, editversions.cgi, and sanitycheck.cgi. Bugzilla-General, Anything that doesn't fit in the other components, or spans multiple components. Creating/Changing Bugs, Creating, changing, and viewing bugs. enter_bug.cgi, post_bug.cgi, show_bug.cgi and process_bug.cgi. Documentation, The bugzilla documentation, including anything in the docs/ directory and The Bugzilla Guide (This document :) Email, Anything to do with email sent by Bugzilla. processmail Installation, The installation process of Bugzilla. This includes checksetup.pl and whatever else it evolves into. Query/Buglist, Anything to do with searching for bugs and viewing the buglists. query.cgi and buglist.cgi Reporting/Charting, Getting reports from Bugzilla. reports.cgi and duplicates.cgi User Accounts, Anything about managing a user account from the user's perspective. userprefs.cgi, saved queries, creating accounts, changing passwords, logging in, etc. User Interface, General issues having to do with the user interface cosmetics (not functionality) including cosmetic issues, HTML templates, etc. A "Milestone", or "Target Milestone" is a often a planned future "Version" of a product. In many cases, though, Milestones simply represent significant dates for a developer. Having certain features in your Product is frequently tied to revenue (money) the developer will receive if the features work by the time she reaches the Target Milestone. Target Milestones are a great tool to organize your time. If someone will pay you $100,000 for incorporating certain features by a certain date, those features by that Milestone date become a very high priority. Milestones tend to be highly malleable creatures, though, that appear to be in reach but are out of reach by the time the important day arrives. The Bugzilla Project has set up Milestones for future Bugzilla versions 2.14, 2.16, 2.18, 3.0, etc. However, a Target Milestone can just as easily be a specific date, code name, or weird alphanumeric combination, like "M19". OK, now let's select the "Bugzilla" component from its scrollbox. Skip down the page a bit -- do you see the "submit query" button? Select it, and let's run this query! Congratulations! You've completed your first Query, and have before you the Bug List of the author of this Guide, Matthew P. Barnson (barnboy@trilobyte.net). If I'm doing well, you'll have a cryptic "Zarro Boogs Found" message on your screen. It is just a happy hacker's way of saying "Zero Bugs Found". However, I am fairly certain I will always have some bugs assigned to me that aren't done yet, so you won't often see that message! I encourage you to click the bug numbers in the left-hand column and examine my bugs. Also notice that if you click the underlined links near the top of this page, they do not take you to context-sensitive help here, but instead sort the columns of bugs on the screen! When you need to sort your bugs by priority, severity, or the people they are assigned to, this is a tremendous timesaver. A couple more interesting things about the Bug List page: Change Columns: by selecting this link, you can show all kinds of information in the Bug List Change several bugs at once: If you have sufficient rights to change all the bugs shown in the Bug List, you can mass-modify them. This is a big time-saver. Send mail to bug owners: If you have many related bugs, you can request an update from every person who owns the bugs in the Bug List asking them the status. Edit this query: If you didn't get exactly the results you were looking for, you can return to the Query page through this link and make small revisions to the query you just made so you get more accurate results. There are many more options to the Bugzilla Query Page and the Bug List than I have shown you. But this should be enough for you to learn to get around. I encourage you to check out the Bugzilla Home Page to learn about the Anatomy and Life Cycle of a Bug before continuing.

And all this time, I thought we were taking bugs out...

Before we plunge into writing your first bug report, I encourage you to read some bug-writing guidelines. If you are reading this document as part of a Bugzilla CVS checkout or un-tarred Bugzilla distribution, you should be able to read them by clicking here. If you are reading this online, check out the Mozilla.org bug-writing guidelines at http://www.mozilla.org/quality/bug-writing-guidelines.html. While some of the advice is Mozilla-specific, the basic principles of reporting Reproducible, Specific bugs, isolating the Product you are using, the Version of the Product, the Component which failed, the Hardware Platform, and Operating System you were using at the time of the failure go a long way toward ensuring accurate, responsible fixes for the bug that bit you. While you are at it, why not learn how to find previously reported bugs? Mozilla.org has published a great tutorial on finding duplicate bugs, available at http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/beginning-duplicate-finding.html. I realize this was a lot to read. However, understanding the mentality of writing great bug reports will help us on the next part! Go back to http://landfill.tequilarista.org/bugzilla-tip/ in your browser. Select the Enter a new bug report link. Select a product. Now you should be at the "Enter Bug" form. The "reporter" should have been automatically filled out for you (or else Bugzilla prompted you to Log In again -- you did keep the email with your username and password, didn't you?). Select a Component in the scrollbox. Bugzilla should have made reasonable guesses, based upon your browser, for the "Platform" and "OS" drop-down boxes. If those are wrong, change them -- if you're on an SGI box running IRIX, we want to know! Fill in the "Assigned To" box with the email address you provided earlier. This way you don't end up sending copies of your bug to lots of other people, since it's just a test bug. Leave the "CC" text box blank. Fill in the "URL" box with "http://www.mozilla.org". Enter "The Bugzilla Guide" in the Summary text box, and place any comments you have on this tutorial, or the Guide in general, into the Description box. Voila! Select "Commit" and send in your bug report! Next we'll look at resolving bugs.

OK, you should have a link to the bug you just created near the top of your page. It should say "Bug XXXX posted", with a link to the right saying "Back to BUG# XXXX". Select this link. Scroll down a bit on the subsequent page, until you see the "Resolve bug, changing resolution to (dropdown box). Normally, you would "Accept bug (change status to ASSIGNED)", fix it, and then resolve. But in this case, we're going to short-circuit the process because this wasn't a real bug. Change the dropdown next to "Resolve Bug" to "INVALID", make sure the radio button is marked next to "Resolve Bug", then click "Commit". Hey! It said it couldn't take the change in a big red box! That's right, you must specify a Comment in order to make this change. Select the "Back" button in your browser, add a Comment, then try Resolving the bug with INVALID status again. This time it should work. You have now learned the basics of Bugzilla navigation, entering a bug, and bug maintenance. I encourage you to explore these features, and see what you can do with them! We'll spend no more time on individual Bugs or Queries from this point on, so you are on your own there. But I'll give a few last hints! There is a CLUE on the Query page that will teach you more how to use the form. If you click the hyperlink on the Component box of the Query page, you will be presented a form that will describe what all the components are. Possibly the most powerful feature of the Query page is the Boolean Chart section. It's a bit confusing to use the first time, but can provide unparalleled flexibility in your queries, allowing you to build extremely powerful requests. Finally, you can build some nifty Reports using the "Bug Reports" link near the bottom of the query page, and also available via the "Reports" link at the footer of each page.

Indiana, it feels like we walking on fortune cookies! These ain't fortune cookies, kid... Customized User Preferences offer tremendous versatility to your individual Bugzilla experience. Let's plunge into what you can do! The first step is to click the "Edit prefs" link at the footer of each page once you have logged in to Landfill.

On this page, you can change your basic Account Settings, including your password and full name. For security reasons, in order to change anything on this page you must type your current password into the Old Password field. If you wish to change your password, type the new password you want into the New Password field and again into the Re-enter new password field to ensure you typed your new password correctly. Select the Submit button and you are done.

Here you can reduce or increase the amount of email sent you from Bugzilla. Although this is referred to as Advanced Email Filtering Options, they are, in fact, the standard email filter set. All of them are self-explanatory, but you can use the filters in interesting ways. For instance, some people (notably Quality Assurance personnel) often only care to receive updates regarding a bug when the bug changes state, so they can track bugs on their flow charts and know when it is time to pull the bug onto a quality assurance platform for inspection. Other people set up email gateways to or , and restrict which types of Bugzilla information are fed to these systems..

This option may not be available in all Bugzilla installations, depending upon the preferences of the systems administrator responsible for the setup of your Bugzilla. However, if you really want this functionality, ask her to "enable newemailtech in Params" and "make it the default for all new users", referring her to the Administration section of this Guide. Disregard the warnings about "experimental and bleeding edge"; the code to handle email in a cleaner manner than that historically used for Bugzilla is quite robust and well-tested now. I recommend you enable the option, "Click here to sign up (and risk any bugs)". Your email-box will thank you for it. The fundamental shift in "newemailtech" is away from standard UNIX "diff" output, which is quite ugly, to a prettier, better laid-out email.

This option may not be available in all Bugzilla installations, depending upon the preferences of the systems administrator responsible for the setup of your Bugzilla. However, if you really want this functionality, ask her to "enable watchers in Params". By entering user email names into the "Users to watch" text entry box, delineated by commas, you can watch bugs of other users. This powerful functionality enables seamless transitions as developers change projects, managers wish to get in touch with the issues faced by their direct reports, or users go on vacation. If any of these three situations apply to you, you will undoubtedly find this feature quite convenient.

By default, this page is quite barren. However, go explore the Query Page some more; you will find that you can store numerous queries on the server, so if you regularly run a particular query it is just a drop-down menu away. On this page of Preferences, if you have many stored queries you can elect to have them always one-click away! If you have many stored queries on the server, here you will find individual drop-downs for each stored query. Each drop-down gives you the option of that query appearing on the footer of every page in Bugzilla! This gives you powerful one-click access to any complex searches you may set up, and is an excellent way to impress your boss... By default, the "My Bugs" link appears at the bottom of each page. However, this query gives you both the bugs you have reported, as well as those you are assigned. One of the most common uses for this page is to remove the "My Bugs" link, replacing it with two other queries, commonly called "My Bug Reports" and "My Bugs" (but only referencing bugs assigned to you). This allows you to distinguish those bugs you have reported from those you are assigned. I commonly set up complex Boolean queries in the Query page and link them to my footer in this page. When they are significantly complex, a one-click reference can save hours of work.

This is a purely informative page which outlines your current permissions on this installation of Bugzilla. If you have permissions to grant certain permissions to other users, the "other users" link appears on this page as well as the footer. For more information regarding user administration, please consult the Administration section of this Guide.

Thank you for reading through this portion of the Bugzilla Guide. I anticipate it may not yet meet the needs of all readers. If you have additional comments or corrections to make, please submit your contributions to the mozilla-webtools mailing list/newsgroup. The mailing list is mirrored to the netscape.public.mozilla.webtools newsgroup, and the newsgroup is mirrored to mozilla-webtools@mozilla.org