Bug Triage
Bugmasters
Mozilla bugmasters manage bugs. We investigate incoming bugs to ensure their information is correct. We also work to add information to confirm and replicate them. Improving meta-information on bugs readies them for developers to fix. We work as a community with each other, with bug reporters, with the quality assurance (QA) team, and with developers to improve the flow of information in bugzilla.mozilla.org.
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.
Managing bugs, including triaging, is done at many stages throughout the bug life cycle. Our job is to make sure bugs move from one part of their life cycle to the next. Here are some of the specific tasks of bugmastering:
- Early triage on incoming bugs to sort out support requests and non-actionable bug reports.
- Closing out very old bugs to improve Bugzilla's signal to noise ratio.
- Replicating and confirming bugs; changing their status from UNCONFIRMED to NEW.
- Determining the correct product and component for an untriaged bug.
- Marking bugs as duplicates of existing, better documented issues.
- Creating a reduced testcase for a bug.
- Regression testing with mozregression to narrow or pinpoint when the bug first appeared.
- Working with user advocacy and developers to bring neglected, but important, bugs to light.
- Catching high priority bugs that may block future releases.
Communication
Join us on IRC to say hello, introduce yourself, and talk about bugs, bugs, bugs.
- IRC channel: irc.mozilla.org#bugmasters.
- Bugmaster days: Every Tuesday on [1]. This is a great place to start. Drop by on IRC and you can help manage bugs with us in real time. New contributors very welcome!
Meetings
If you are interested in managing bugs, please join us for the regular bugmaster meetings every other Thursday at 9:30 AM pacific.
Contributing as a bugmaster
This and the guide below are early drafts from January 2013. We welcome improvements! If you want to talk over the ideas here without directly editing them, you can add to their talk pages, chat with lizzard (Liz Henry) on IRC, or email lhenry@mozilla.com.
Bugmastering Guide - How to contribute to bug management and triage.