Thunderbird:Bug Triage

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WIP - Work In Progress

The purpose of the document to help anyone interested in helping improve Thunderbird through the process of triaging of Thunderbird bugs. Triage of and resolution of bugs helps drive both the quality of the product and the development process, and thus has a great impact on user satisfaction. What's great is anyone can help, no matter how little or extensive your experience with the product, with QA or the triage process. No prior experience is required.

Contributing, aka How you can help with Thunderbird bugs

In general:

• If you do not have elevated Bugzilla privileges canconfirm or editbugs (if you don't know what these are then you don't have them) we suggest you may as well work toward getting these privileges as you comment in bugs and file new ones. See simple instructions on how to get these privileges. (Note: you do not need privileges to just comment in bugs.)

• Comment in existing bug reports to either improve the quality or to prove or disprove that the bug exists, particularly:
  • Add or improve steps to to reproduce
  • Confirm if you have privileges
  • (additional items)

• cc: yourself (without comment) on the bug you care about or can help in the future but can't help just now.

• File a new bug if you have a problem that hasn't been reported, or an existing bug report mentions more than one problem that do not have a bug filed.

• Help QA future versions - either the next major release or minor update - see Release heading

• Help with Thunderbird Bug Days

Triage Process

From canned the Thunderbird bugzilla queries, or your own query, pick the type of bug you are interested in or presently have trouble with. If you don't have a specific interest, we list several types of bugs that are deserving of interest and care.

Bugzilla Queries

Thunderbird bug queries

There are also shared queries in Bugzilla has shared queries for various states of Thunderbird. Go to Actions/Preferences/Saved Searches and search for "Thunderbird". Anyone with canconfirm privs can add them to the Bugzilla page footer by going to Actions/Preferences/Saved Searches from that footer.

Triage Tools and Hints

Nightlies ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/nightly/latest-trunk/ Branch Release candidates and Release archives ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/releases/

bugzilla talkback + crash-stats

extensions (thunderbird + FF): NTT

bookmark shortcuts ?greasemonkey

Where to go for help: irc #maildev, #qa,

Canconfirm and Editbugs Priveleges

To get elevated privileges to triage Thunderbird bugs ...

If you don't have canconfirm privilege, which allows you to file bugs in a New state and confirm other's bugs by changing them from Unco to New, do one of the following:

• If you haven't filed many bugs, go through all the steps under "Confirm the Unconfirmed" for three bugs.
• Mail the full URLs of the bugs.
• If everything looks okay, you'll then get the "can confirm a bug" privilege.

To get "editbugs", allows you to edit most aspects of a bug, mail either:

• The URLs of two bugs to which you have attached patches or testcases; or
• The URLs of the relevant comment on three bugs which you wanted to change, but couldn't, and so added a comment instead.

Bugs you probably do not want to not use towards getting your privileges :

• CLOSEME in whiteboard - many are trivial and/or lack much useful information
• Bugs about moving and copying messages - often not easily verified (Exception: if you personally experienced the problem in the time frame described by the reporter(s), and therefore in a good position to say whether the problem does or does not exist today on a newer release.)

See / add useful information

References

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/rumblingedge/archives/2005/06/thunderbird_release_changelogs.html and what not to do in Bugzilla ==http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/bugzilla-privilege-guide.html#unconfirmed