The art of bug triage, KMail bugday on sunday (+ hello planet)

First of all a big hello to everyone reading this. This is my first blogpost syndicated on planetkde (actually it's the first one ever) so I'll introduce myself shortly:

• Name: Michael Leupold
• ASL: 29/m/Karlsruhe, Germany
• Working on: kwallet and bugsquad

Thanks to Jonathan Riddell for taking no longer than 2 minutes for getting my blog on the planet So now on to something a little more interesting...

The art of bug triage (which is not really an art but it somehow sounded catchy)

Today I'll try to explain the concept of that mysterious triage thing Bugsquad is doing. Some people seem to think it's about finding and fixing bugs but actually it's not.

• So, what is bug triage all about? Basically bug triage is the task of grabbing a bug one of our users reported on bugs.kde.org and trying to reproduce it using the information the reporter provided.
• Why recheck all those bugs? Most of the bugs we check date back to older relases of KDE. That means they could have been fixed in newer KDE releases. Maybe the developer fixing it wasn't aware of the bug, maybe the bug got fixed "accidentally". Our goal is to not have developers waste time on bugs that don't exist any longer. Even checking new bugs is beneficial. Sometimes the description on a bug report will be easy to understand and reproducable, but quite some times you'll have to gather some additional information on how to expose the buggy behaviour. Our goal is to have developers spend more time on fixing bugs than understanding what a bug's reporter was trying to say.
• How does bug triage help KDE? By closing bugs that are no longer there we limit the number of bugs the developers have to take care of. By providing additional information we help them save time understanding and fixing the bugs. Sometimes we also manage to direct their attention to what we deem important to fix. Our main objective is raising KDE's quality.
• What do I need to help? Not much really. You should be able to operate an IRC client and your favourite browser. You also need a current release of KDE (4.1 is ok, 4.1.1 is good, compiled from trunk is best) and some patience.
• I'm thrilled to help. Where do I sign up? While there's always someone around on our IRC channel we usually meet on planned Bugdays where we all work on a common part of KDE. If you're interested you can also signup to our mailinglist: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/bugsquad
• References
  • http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Bugsquad
  • http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Bugsquad/Guide

Our next bugday will be this Sunday, September 14th starting around 07:00 UTC. We'll be triaging KMail!