Thunderbird:Bug Triage

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The purpose of this document to assist 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. The goal of triage is to either close the bug as no longer useful or invalid, or move it to a high state of quality where a developer can take action to fix and resolve it.

What's great is anyone can help, no matter how little or how extensive your experience with the product, with QA, with code, or with triaging. And there are plenty of people to help you in this process. No prior experience is needed.

The current state of Thunderbird bugs is mixed, so we can use your help. Many bugs are actively being worked by developers or are of high enough quality for it to be worked on. But, there are many unconfirmed (UNCO) bugs and bugs of poor quality - eg. in a confirmed state but very old and/or in need of reevaluation.

Contributing, aka How you can help with Thunderbird bugs

In general:

• If you don't have elevated Bugzilla privileges (canconfirm/editbugs) or don't know what these are, we suggest you work towards getting privileges as you comment in bugs and file new ones (knowing what you are doing will help you get privileges). Note: privileges are optional and not needed to just comment in bugs.

• Triage and comment in existing bug reports to improve the quality or to prove or disprove that the bug exists.

• cc: yourself (without comment) on bugs 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 a problem that does not have a bug filed.

• Help with Testing and QA of future versions and updates

• Help with Thunderbird Bug Days

• Mozilla Messaging - Get Involved

Triage Process

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

Then, use the well established triage process, working by yourself or in tandem with the reporter and others in the bug, to evaluate and/or improve the bug, and help drive it to a successful resolution.

Especially:

• Add or improve steps to to reproduce
• Determine if a bug exists on a newer release, or trunk build
• Confirm or resolve the bug if you have privileges

Triage Resources, Tools and Hints

• Builds
  • Hourly builds - to test a patch that a developer just landed
  • Nightly builds aka nightlies - the bleeding edge
  • Archives of Branch Releases
  • An explanation about versions and builds for testing...
  • see also builds forum below
• Bugzilla
  • Search Shortcuts:
    • "Install the (FF) Quick Search plugin"
    • the Help link for bugzilla's not well-known quick search, "Find a bug".
  • Search Advanced
  • What and what not to do in Bugzilla
• Useful Extra Debugging for expanding bug reports.
• Extensions useful in debugging, using bugzilla and triage
  • firefox: Nightly Tester Tools aka NTT, TinyURL Creator, greasemonkey
    • greasemonkey scripts:
      • Highlight Table Row on Click to mark your place
      • Ruderman's Bookmarklet Bugzilla collection including "shorten bug query", "hide visited bug rows", "reference bug", "prefill bug report"
  • thunderbird: Nightly Tester Tools aka NTT, Profile Switcher
• Crash reports for branch builds @talkback, trunk builds @crash-stats (note: NTT extension provides direct links to your crashes)
• Discussion and Help (for Testing and QA)
  • mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird newsgroup
  • IRC chat -- help with QA/triage tools and methods: #qa channel -- product-related help: #maildev
  • Weekly developments in Mozilla Thunderbird builds
  • Daily Build Thread, and in RSS
  • Builds Forum - The testing community at Mozillazine
• News and Archival Information
  • Releases Tracking - schedule, plan and bugs fixed
  • Thunderbird Release Changelogs
• References and Miscellaneous
  • Mozilla General Concepts and Terms
  • Excellent Glossary
  • http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/bugzilla-privilege-guide.html#unconfirmed

Canconfirm and Editbugs Privileges

To get elevated privileges to triage Thunderbird bugs ...

If you don't have canconfirm privilege (which allows you to create 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 may 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.)