# Using Bugzilla

## How do I use Bugzilla?

This section contains information for end-users of Bugzilla. There is a Bugzilla test installation, called Landfill, which you are welcome to play with (if it's up). However, not all of the Bugzilla installations there will necessarily have all Bugzilla features enabled, and different installations run different versions, so some things may not quite work as this document describes.

### Create a Bugzilla Account

If you want to use Bugzilla, first you need to create an account. Consult with the administrator responsible for your installation of Bugzilla for the URL you should use to access it. If you're test-driving Bugzilla, use this URL:

1. Click the Open a new Bugzilla account

   link, enter your email address and, optionally, your name in the spaces provided, then click Create Account

   .

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 can be changed to something more memorable.

3. Click the Log In link in the yellow area at the bottom of the page in your browser, enter your email address and password into the spaces provided, and click Login.

You are now logged in. Bugzilla uses cookies for authentication so, unless your IP address changes, you should not have to log in again.

### Anatomy of a Bug

The core of Bugzilla is the screen which displays a particular bug. It's a good place to explain some Bugzilla concepts. Bug 1 on Landfill

is a good example. Note that the labels for most fields are hyperlinks; clicking them will take you to context-sensitive help on that particular field. Fields marked * may not be present on every installation of Bugzilla.

1. Product and Component: Bugs are divided up by Product and Component, with a Product having one or more Components in it. For example, bugzilla.mozilla.org's "Bugzilla" Product is composed of several Components:

   - Administration: Administration of a Bugzilla installation.
   - Bugzilla-General: Anything that doesn't fit in the other components, or spans multiple components.
   - Creating/Changing Bugs: Creating, changing, and viewing bugs.
   - Documentation: The Bugzilla documentation, including The Bugzilla Guide.
   - Email: Anything to do with email sent by Bugzilla.
   - Installation: The installation process of Bugzilla.
   - Query/Buglist: Anything to do with searching for bugs and viewing the buglists.
   - Reporting/Charting: Getting reports from Bugzilla.
   - User Accounts: Anything about managing a user account from the user's perspective. 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.

2. Status and Resolution:

   These define exactly what state the bug is in - from not even being confirmed as a bug, through to being fixed and the fix confirmed by Quality Assurance. The different possible values for Status and Resolution on your installation should be documented in the context-sensitive help for those items.

3. Assigned To: The person responsible for fixing the bug.

4. *URL: A URL associated with the bug, if any.

5. Summary: A one-sentence summary of the problem.

6. *Status Whiteboard: (a.k.a. Whiteboard) A free-form text area for adding short notes and tags to a bug.

7. *Keywords: The administrator can define keywords which you can use to tag and categorise bugs - e.g. The Mozilla Project has keywords like crash and regression.

8. Platform and OS: These indicate the computing environment where the bug was found.

9. Version: The "Version" field is usually used for versions of a product which have been released, and is set to indicate which versions of a Component have the particular problem the bug report is about.

10. Priority: The bug assignee uses this field to prioritise his or her bugs. It's a good idea not to change this on other people's bugs.

11. Severity: This indicates how severe the problem is - from blocker ("application unusable") to trivial ("minor cosmetic issue"). You can also use this field to indicate whether a bug is an enhancement request.

12. *Target: (a.k.a. Target Milestone) A future version by which the bug is to be fixed. e.g. The Bugzilla Project's milestones for future Bugzilla versions are 2.18, 2.20, 3.0, etc. Milestones are not restricted to numbers, thought - you can use any text strings, such as dates.

13. Reporter: The person who filed the bug.

14. CC list: A list of people who get mail when the bug changes.

15. Attachments: You can attach files (e.g. testcases or patches) to bugs. If there are any attachments, they are listed in this section.

16. *Dependencies: If this bug cannot be fixed unless other bugs are fixed (depends on), or this bug stops other bugs being fixed (blocks), their numbers are recorded here.

17. *Votes: Whether this bug has any votes.

18. Additional Comments: You can add your two cents to the bug discussion here, if you have something worthwhile to say.

### Life Cycle of a Bug

The life cycle, also known as work flow, of a bug is currently hardcoded into Bugzilla. contains a graphical repsentation of this life cycle. If you wish customize this image for your site, the diagram file is available in Dia's native XML format.

#### Lifecycle of a Bugzilla Bug

### Searching for Bugs

The Bugzilla Search page is is the interface where you can find any bug report, comment, or patch currently in the Bugzilla system. You can play with it here:

.

The Search page has controls for selecting different possible values for all of the fields in a bug, as described above. Once you've defined a search, you can either run it, or save it as a Remembered Query, which can optionally appear in the footer of your pages.

Highly advanced querying is done using Boolean Charts, which have their own context-sensitive help

.

### Bug Lists

If you run a search, a list of matching bugs will be returned. The default search is to return all open bugs on the system - don't try running this search on a Bugzilla installation with a lot of bugs!

The format of the list is configurable. For example, it can be sorted by clicking the column headings. Other useful features can be accessed using the links at the bottom of the list:

- Long Format:

  this gives you a large page with a non-editable summary of the fields of each bug.
- Change Columns:

  change the bug attributes which appear in the list.
- Change several bugs at once:

  If your account is sufficiently empowered, you can make the same change to all the bugs in the list - for example, changing their owner.
- Send mail to bug owners:

  Sends mail to the owners of all bugs on the list.
- 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.

### Filing Bugs

Years of bug writing experience has been distilled for your reading pleasure into the Bug Writing Guidelines. While some of the advice is Mozilla-specific, the basic principles of reporting Reproducible, Specific bugs, isolating the Product you are using, the Version of the Product, the Component which failed, the Hardware Platform, and Operating System you were using at the time of the failure go a long way toward ensuring accurate, responsible fixes for the bug that bit you.

The procedure for filing a test bug is as follows:

1. Go to Landfill in your browser and click Enter a new bug report.

2. Select a product - any one will do.

3. Fill in the fields. Bugzilla should have made reasonable guesses, based upon your browser, for the "Platform" and "OS" drop-down boxes. If they are wrong, change them.

4. Select "Commit" and send in your bug report.

## Hints and Tips

This section distills some Bugzilla tips and best practices that have been developed.

### Autolinkification

Bugzilla comments are plain text - so posting HTML will result in literal HTML tags rather than being interpreted by a browser. However, Bugzilla will automatically make hyperlinks out of certain sorts of text in comments. For example, the text http://www.bugzilla.org will be turned into http://www.bugzilla.org. Other strings which get linkified in the obvious manner are:

- bug 12345
- bug 23456, comment 53
- attachment 4321
- mailto:george@example.com
- george@example.com
- ftp://ftp.mozilla.org
- Most other sorts of URL

A corollary here is that if you type a bug number in a comment, you should put the word "bug" before it, so it gets autolinkified for the convenience of others.

### Quicksearch

Quicksearch is a single-text-box query tool which uses metacharacters to indicate what is to be searched. For example, typing "`foo|bar`" into Quicksearch would search for "foo" or "bar" in the summary and status whiteboard of a bug; adding "`:BazProduct`" would search only in that product.

You'll find the Quicksearch box on Bugzilla's front page, along with a Help link which details how to use it.

### Comments

If you are changing the fields on a bug, only comment if either you have something pertinent to say, or Bugzilla requires it. Otherwise, you may spam people unnecessarily with bug mail. To take an example: a user can set up their account to filter out messages where someone just adds themselves to the CC field of a bug (which happens a lot.) If you come along, add yourself to the CC field, and add a comment saying "Adding self to CC", then that person gets a pointless piece of mail they would otherwise have avoided.

Don't use sigs in comments. Signing your name ("Bill") is acceptable, particularly if you do it out of habit, but full mail/news-style four line ASCII art creations are not.

### Attachments

Use attachments, rather than comments, for large chunks of ASCII data, such as trace, debugging output files, or log files. That way, it doesn't bloat the bug for everyone who wants to read it, and cause people to receive fat, useless mails.

Trim screenshots. There's no need to show the whole screen if you are pointing out a single-pixel problem.

Don't attach simple test cases (e.g. one HTML file, one CSS file and an image) as a ZIP file. Instead, upload them in reverse order and edit the referring file so that they point to the attached files. This way, the test case works immediately out of the bug.

### Filing Bugs

Try to make sure that everything said in the summary is also said in the first comment. Summaries are often updated and this will ensure your original information is easily accessible.

You do not need to put "any" or similar strings in the URL field. If there is no specific URL associated with the bug, leave this field blank.

If you feel a bug you filed was incorrectly marked as a DUPLICATE of another, please question it in your bug, not the bug it was duped to. Feel free to CC the person who duped it if they are not already CCed.

## User Preferences

Once you have logged in, you can customise various aspects of Bugzilla via the "Edit prefs" link in the page footer. The preferences are split into four tabs:

### Account Settings

On this tab, you can change your basic account information, including your password, email address and real name. For security reasons, in order to change anything on this page you must type your current password into the Password field at the top of the page. If you attempt to change your email address, a confirmation email is sent to both the old and new addresses, with a link to use to confirm the change. This helps to prevent account hijacking.

### Email Settings

This tab controls the amount of email Bugzilla sends you.

The first item on this page is marked Users to watch. When you enter one or more comma-delineated user accounts (usually email addresses) into the text entry box, you will receive a copy of all the bugmail those users are sent (security settings permitting). This powerful functionality enables seamless transitions as developers change projects or users go on holiday.

The ability to watch other users may not be available in all Bugzilla installations. If you don't see this feature, and feel that you need it, speak to your administrator.

The Field/recipient specific options table allows you to determine how much mail Bugzilla sends you. The rows of the table define events that can happen to a bug -- things like attachments being added, new comments being made, the priority changing, etc. The columns in the table define your relationship with the bug:

- Reporter - Where you are the person who initially reported the bug. Your name/account appears in the Reporter: field.

- Assignee - Where you are the person who has been designated as the one responsible for the bug. Your name/account appears in the Assigned To: field of the bug.

- QA Contact - You are one of the designated QA Contacts for the bug. Your account appears in the QA Contact: text-box of the bug.

- CC - You are on the list CC List for the bug. Your account appears in the CC: text box of the bug.

- Voter - You have placed one or more votes for the bug. Your account appears only if someone clicks on the Show votes for this bug link on the bug.

Some columns may not be visible for your installation, depending on your site's configuration.

To fine-tune your bugmail, decide the events for which you want to receive bugmail; then decide if you want to receive it all the time (enable the checkbox for every column), or only when you have a certain relationship with a bug (enable the checkbox only for those columns). For example: if you didn't want to receive mail when someone added themselves to the CC list, you could uncheck all the boxes in the CC Field Changes line. As another example, if you never wanted to receive email on bugs you reported unless the bug was resolved, you would un-check all boxes in the Reporter column except for the one on the The bug is resolved or verified row.

If you want to receive the maximum amount of email possible, check every box in every column. if you don't want to receive any email from Bugzilla at all, ensure that every box in this table is un-checked.

Your Bugzilla administrator can stop a user from receiving bugmail by adding the user's name to the `data/nomail` file. This is a drastic step best taken only for disabled accounts, as it overrides the the user's individual mail preferences.

Bugzilla adds the X-Bugzilla-Reason header to all bugmail it sends, describing the recipient's relationship (AssignedTo, Reporter, QAContact, CC, or Voter) to the bug. This header can be used to do further client-side filtering.

By default, Bugzilla sends out email regardless of who made the change... even if you were the one responsible for generating the email in the first place. If you don't care to receive bugmail from your own changes, check the box marked Only email me reports of changes made by other people.

### Page Footer

On the Search page, you can store queries in Bugzilla, so if you regularly run a particular query it is just a drop-down menu away. Once you have a stored query, you can come here to request that it also be displayed in your page footer.

### Permissions

This is a purely informative page which outlines your current permissions on this installation of Bugzilla - what product groups you are in, and whether you can edit bugs or perform various administration functions.