Bugmasters/Guide

From MozillaWiki
Jump to: navigation, search

Welcome, bugmasters! Managing and sorting bugs, or "triaging" can mean many different things to different people and teams. Here are some paths to contribution.

Bugmastering is a perfect gateway into open source involvement and can lead you toward any number of goals as you build your skills. It may lead you to work on code and submit patches. In fact, some of our top coders began as bugmasters. Or you may find that you prefer working with the quality team to help resolve Firefox crashes and run complex tests on Mozilla's products. Perhaps you'll decide to work more closely with the other first-time users as a user advocate – or as a long term bugmaster. Whatever you choose, bugmastering is a great first step to allow you to meet the people that power the Mozilla project and learn the ropes to accelerate your involvement.

Starting up as a bugmaster

Beginning tasks

If you're new to bugmastering, it will be easiest to tackle early bug triage and tasks such as:

Note that the best way to get started though is to join us on #bugmasters on IRC and we can work with you.

These are some good ways to test the waters.

Over time, beginning bugmasters will build up more and more knowledge about how to move bugs from one part of their life cycle to another. As the bugmaster community grows it will be crucial for us to listen to feedback from people with all levels of experience, so we can improve how we work. Please help to improve this page and other documentation!

Advanced bugmastery

  • Ask for canconfirm permissions if you have commented on, triaged, or filed at least three bugs that are in good shape.
  • Email to ask for editbugs permissions if you find you need to change a field (such as the title) in several bugs, but could not, and had to make the change in comments instead.

Finding and filing bugs

If you would like to hunt for bugs, QA has information on running Nightly builds and doing software testing.

If you've found a bug and want to report it, read How to File a Bug.


Branching out as an expert bugmaster

Here are some possible ways to dive deeper into bug triage and management. Please add more to this list as we evolve the bugmaster pages!

More links on triaging and managing bugs

Miscellaneous documentation and triage instructions, useful for bugmasters. We'll use these to help us overhaul the general triaging and bug workflow.

Bugzilla docs

Triage docs

Triage docs for specific teams or modules

  • Triaging crash bugs. Tackle bugs that may have caused a crash. Learn how to find crash bugs, add complete steps to reproduce, a stack trace, and a reduced testcase for a crash bug, then tag it for a developer to review. The CraskKill team triage notes may be helpful.
  • DevTools triage: https://wiki.mozilla.org/DevTools/Triage
    • Process: P1 = blocking others, very important, P2 = important, P3 = valuable, can wait
    • P1 and 2 have to have an assignee
    • Bugs without a priority need triaging to get one assigned.
  • Triaging networking bugs. An explanation of the networking components, whiteboard tags, and other processes used for triaging by developers in this area of Mozilla.
  • Core modules listed with explanations and links.

Tools and Custom Dashboards

Some Bugmastering communities

Here are a few other FOSS projects that have bug-focused communities.