Bug Triage Day

The Unconfirmed Bugs Triage Day is held on a weekly basis. This event is open to anyone wanting to help, contribute or just hang out with us on the #qa channel. If you’re reading this, you might be interested to know further details. Here's a glimpse of what to expect and a small guide to help you get started.

Why: Bugs can stay unnoticed in Bugzilla for a long period of time - they're either not moved in the right component or are missing vital information to get them in developers' hands. Our aim for the day is to manage incoming bugs in the Untriaged component.

What is “triaging”: Managing incoming bugs - move bugs to the proper component, ask follow-up questions, confirm unconfirmed bugs, close invalid and duplicate bugs.

How: Here is the basic set of instructions to help you out while looking over a bug (you can also find them in the wiki):

1. Read the description and comments in the bug to understand the problem

2. Look for duplicates - make sure the bug is not a duplicate of an existing issue. Search using Bugzilla’s search function. If the bug is indeed a duplicate, mark it as a duplicate of the original logged issue. Ask someone on IRC to mark it if you don’t have the rights.

3. If you clearly understand the bug, move it out of the Untriaged component into something more appropriate

a) Here you can find more information about the most relevant components under the Firefrox, Core and Toolkit categories:

Firefox , Core , Toolkit

b) If you don't understand the bug, add a comment to the report asking followup questions. Some questions you might want to ask to take the bug forward:

• Does the bug happen with the latest Nightly?
• Does the bug happen when running in Safe Mode?
• Does the bug happen in competing browsers?
• Does the bug happen on other Firefox versions?
• What are the detailed steps to reproduce?
• Is there a minimized testcase or URL we can use to test?

4. If you can reproduce the bug, mark it as NEW (if you have appropriate rights - leave a comment otherwise).

5. Try to keep an eye on the bug in the following days, if there's anything else you can do to help.

Note: Make sure to add [bugday-yyyymmdd] in the whiteboard of all the bugs you work on today. If you don’t have the rights to edit the whiteboard, you can simply add it in a comment. That way you will mark the fact that you contributed to this event.

Ask: For any questions or tips, use the #qa channel on IRC. We'll be there to help.

Triaging is not complicated, but the intricacies of Bugzilla may seem daunting at first. If you want to dive in further in the triaging process, here are some references that will help: