4.3. How do I use Bugzilla?

4.3.1. Create a Bugzilla Account

First thing's first! 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 the end-user Bugzilla experience, use this URL: http://landfill.tequilarista.org/mozilla/bugzilla/

1. Click the "Open a new Bugzilla account" link.

2. 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.

3. Within 5-10 minutes, 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).

4. 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".

   Note: If you ever forget your password, you can come back to this page, enter your "E-mail address", then select the "E-mail me a password" button to have your password mailed to you again so that you can login.

   Caution

   Many modern browsers include an "Auto-Complete" or "Form Fill" feature to remember the user names and passwords you type in at many sites. Unfortunately, sometimes they attempt to "guess" what you will put in as your password, and guess wrong. If you notice a text box is already filled out, please overwrite the contents of the text box so you can be sure to input the correct information.

Congratulations! If you followed these directions, you now are the proud owner of a user account on landfill.tequilarista.org (Landfill) or your local Bugzilla install. You should now see in your browser a page called the "Bugzilla Query Page". It may look daunting, but with this Guide to walk you through it, you will master it in no time.

4.3.2. The Bugzilla Query Page

The Bugzilla Query Page is the heart and soul of Bugzilla. It is the master interface where you can find any bug report, comment, or patch currently in the Bugzilla system. We'll go into how to create your own bug report later on.

There are efforts underway to simplify query usage. If you have a local installation of Bugzilla 2.12 or higher, you should have "quicksearch.html" available to use and simplify your searches. There is also, or shortly will be, a helper for the query interface, called "queryhelp.cgi". Landfill tends to run the latest code, so these two utilities should be available there for your perusal.

At this point, please visit the main Bugzilla site, bugzilla.mozilla.org, to see a more fleshed-out query page.

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.

Notice the page that popped up? Every underlined word you see on your screen is a hyperlink that will take you to context-sensitive help. Click around for a while, and learn what everything here does. To return to the query interface after pulling up a help page, use the "Back" button in your browser.

I'm sure that after checking out the online help, you are now an Expert on the Bugzilla Query Page. If, however, you feel you haven't mastered it yet, let me walk you through making 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). You're smart, I think you have it figured out.

   Basically, selecting anything on the query page narrows your search down. Leaving stuff unselected, or text boxes unfilled, broadens your search!

2. 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 "barnboy@trilobyte.net" 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 "Webtools". Select this entry.

4. Did you notice that some of the boxes to the right changed when you selected "Webtools"? Every Program (or Product) has different Versions, Components, and Target Milestones associated with it. A "Version" is the number of a software program.

   Example 4-1. Some Famous Software Versions

   Do you remember the hype in 1995 when Microsoft Windows 95(r) was released? It may have been several years ago, but Microsoft(tm) spent over $300 Million advertising this new Version of their software. Three years later, they released Microsoft Windows 98(r), another new version, to great fanfare, and then in 2000 quietly released Microsoft Windows ME(Millenium Edition)(r).

   Software "Versions" help a manufacturer differentiate their current product from their previous products. Most do not identify their products by the year they were released. Instead, the "original" version of their software will often be numbered "1.0", with small bug-fix releases on subsequent tenths of a digit. In most cases, it's not a decimal number; for instance, often 1.9 is an older version of the software than 1.11, but is a newer version than 1.1.1.

   In general, a "Version" in Bugzilla should refer to released products, not products that have not yet been released to the public. Forthcoming products are what the Target Milestone field is for.

   A "Component" is a piece of a Product. It may be a standalone program, or some other logical division of a Product or Program. Normally, a Component has a single Owner, who is responsible for overseeing efforts to improve that Component.

   Example 4-2. Mozilla Webtools Components

   Mozilla's "Webtools" Product is composed of several pieces (Components):

   Bonsai, a tool to show recent changes to Mozilla

   Bugzilla, a defect-tracking tool

   Build, a tool to automatically compile source code into machine-readable form

   Despot, a program that controls access to the other Webtools

   LXR, a utility that automatically marks up text files to make them more readable

   MozBot, a "robot" that announces changes to Mozilla in Chat

   TestManager, a tool to help find bugs in Mozilla

   Tinderbox, which displays reports from Build

   A different person is responsible for each of these Components. Tara Hernandez keeps the "Bugzilla" component up-to-date.

   A "Milestone", or "Target Milestone" is a often a planned future "Version" of a product. In many cases, though, Milestones simply represent significant dates for a developer. Having certain features in your Product is frequently tied to revenue (money) the developer will receive if the features work by the time she reaches the Target Milestone. Target Milestones are a great tool to organize your time. If someone will pay you $100,000 for incorporating certain features by a certain date, those features by that Milestone date become a very high priority. Milestones tend to be highly malleable creatures, though, that appear to be in reach but are out of reach by the time the important day arrives.

   The Bugzilla Project has set up Milestones for future Bugzilla versions 2.14, 2.16, 2.18, 3.0, etc. However, a Target Milestone can just as easily be a specific date, code name, or weird alphanumeric combination, like "M19".

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, and have before you the Bug List of the author of this Guide, Matthew P. Barnson (barnboy@trilobyte.net). If I'm doing well, you'll have a cryptic "Zarro Boogs Found" message on your screen. It is just a happy hacker's way of saying "Zero Bugs Found". However, I am fairly certain I will always have some bugs assigned to me that aren't done yet, so you won't often see that message!

I encourage you to click the bug numbers in the left-hand column and examine my bugs. Also notice that if you click the underlined links near the top of this page, they do not take you to context-sensitive help here, but instead sort the columns of bugs on the screen! When you need to sort your bugs by priority, severity, or the people they are assigned to, this is a tremendous timesaver.

A couple more interesting things about the Bug List page:

4.3.3. Creating and Managing Bug Reports