Bugzilla is Defect Tracking Systems allow individual or groups of developers to keep track of outstanding bugs in their product effectively. Bugzilla is a open-source bug-tracking software.
Bugzilla offers superior performance on commodity hardware, better price (free!), more developer- friendly features (such as stored queries, email integration, and platform independence), improved scalability, open source code, greater flexibility, and superior ease-of-use.
2. Why should you use Bugzilla?
Bugzilla can dramatically increase the productivity and accountability of individual employees by providing a documented workflow and positive feedback for good performance.
3. How to create a Bugzilla Account?
1. 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.
2. 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).
3. 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".
4. What is The Bugzilla Query Page?
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.
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.
Here is a example that how to make a few successful queries to find out what there are in the Bugzilla bug-tracking system itself.
1. 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).
2. 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 "yourname@gmail.com" in the top Email text box.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. OK, now let's select the "Bugzilla" component from its scrollbox. 6. Skip down the page a bit -- do you see the "submit query" button? Select it, and let's run this query!
7. Congratulations! You've completed your first Query.
5. How to Write a Useful Bug Report with Bugzilla?
Useful bug reports are ones that get bugs fixed. A useful bug report normally has two qualities:
Reproducible. If an engineer can't see it or conclusively prove that it exists, the engineer will probably stamp it WORKSFORME or INVALID, and move on to the next bug. Every relevant detail you can provide helps.
Specific. The quicker the engineer can isolate the issue to a specific problem, the more likely it'll be expediently fixed. If you're crashing on a site, please take the time to isolate what on the page is triggering the crash, and include it as an HTML snippet in the bug report if possible. (Specific bugs have the added bonus of remaining relevant when an engineer actually gets to them; in a rapidly changing web, a bug report of "foo.com crashes my browser" becomes meaningless after the site experiences a half-dozen redesigns and hundreds of content changes.)
1. Go back to http://landfill.tequilarista.org/bugzilla-tip/ in your browser.
2. Select the Enter a new bug report link.
3. Select a product.
4. 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?).
5. Select a Component in the scrollbox.
6. 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!
7. 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.
8. Leave the "CC" text box blank. Fill in the "URL" box with "http://www.mozilla.org".
9. 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.
6. How to manage a Bug Reports with Bugzilla?
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.
1.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".
2. 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.
7. What about Account Settings page?
On this page, you can change your basic Account Settings, including your password and full name. For security reasons,
8. What about Watching Users functionality?
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.
9. What is 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.
10. How to Enter your Useful Bug Report into Bugzilla?
From the Bugzilla main page (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org), choose "Enter a new bug".
Select the product that you've found a bug in.
Now, fill out the form. Here's what it all means:
Where did you find the bug? --- which product,which product version,which component, which hardware platform ,which Operating System
How important is the bug? -- Severity
Who will be following up on the bug? -- Which engineer should be responsible for fixing this bug? Who else should receive e-mail updates on changes to this bug?
What else can you tell the engineer about the bug? -- On what URL did you discover this bug? How would you describe the bug, in approximately 60 or fewer characters?
11. Where can I find my user preferences?
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.
12. What about Email Settings page?
Here you can reduce or increase the amount of email sent you from Bugzilla.
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!
14. What is Bugzillas features?
* 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)
* Administration of a bugzilla:
(editcomponents.cgi, editgroups.cgi, editkeywords.cgi, editparams.cgi, editproducts.cgi, editusers.cgi, editversions.cgi, and sanitycheck.cgi.)
* Bugzilla-General: (Creating/Changing Bugs, Creating, changing, and viewing bugs. enter_bug.cgi, post_bug.cgi, show_bug.cgi and process_bug.cgi.)
* The bugzilla documentation
* Email, Anything to do with email sent by Bugzilla. processmail
* The installation process of Bugzilla
* 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.
16. How do I change my user name in Bugzilla?
You can't. However, the administrative account can, by simply opening your user account in editusers.cgi and changing the login name.
It is web and e-mail based. You can edit bugs by sending specially formatted email to a properly configured Bugzilla, or control via the web.
18. How does Bugzilla stack up against other bug-tracking databases?
Still can't find any head-to-head comparisons of Bugzilla against other defect-tracking software.
19. Does Bugzilla allow the user to track multiple projects?
Absolutely! You can track up to a "soft-limit" of around 64 individual "Products", that can each be composed of as many "Components" as you want. Check the Administration section of the Bugzilla Guide for more information regarding setting up Products and Components.
Yes. There are many specific MIME-types that are pre-defined by Bugzilla, but you may specify any arbitrary MIME-type you need when you upload the file. Since all attachments are stored in the database, however, I recommend storing large binary attachments elsewhere in the web server's file system and providing a hyperlink as a comment, or in the provided "URL" field in the bug report.
Yes. However, modifying some fields, notably those related to bug progression states, also require adjusting the program logic to compensate for the change. There is no GUI for adding fields to Bugzilla at this time.
It's possible to get the footer on the static index page using Server Side Includes (SSI). The trick to doing this is making sure that your web server is set up to allow SSI and specifically, the #exec directive. You should also rename index.html to index.shtml.
After you've done all that, you can add the following line to index.shtml:
< !--#exec cmd="/usr/bin/perl -e "require 'CGI.pl'; PutFooter();"" -->
This line will be replaced with the actual HTML for the footer when the page is requested, so you should put this line where you want the footer to appear.
Because this method depends on being able to use a #exec directive, and most ISP's will not allow that, there is an alternative method. You could have a small script (such as api.cgi) that basically looks like:
#!/usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl -w
require 'globals.pl';
if ($::FORM{sub} eq 'PutFooter') {
PutFooter();
} else {
die 'api.cgi was incorrectly called';
}
and then put this line in index.shtml.
<!--#include virtual="api.cgi?sub=PutFooter"-->
Yes.
25. If there is email notification, do users have to have any particular type of email application?
Bugzilla email is sent in plain text, the most compatible mail format on the planet.
