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This document provides information on how to triage bugs for the Fedora project. Triaging is the name given for confirming, prioritizing, and organizing bug reports and is a good place for new contributors and/or contributors with limited programming abilities to help the Fedora project becoming a better distribution for everyone. Triaging is an incredibly important aspect of development that benefits users and developers alike by acting as a bridge between users and developers to aid in fixing and closing bugs.
This document provides information on how to triage bugs for the Fedora project. Triaging is the name given for confirming, prioritizing, and organizing bug reports and is a good place for new contributors and/or contributors with limited programming abilities to help the Fedora project becoming a better distribution for everyone. Triaging is an incredibly important aspect of development that benefits users and developers alike by acting as a bridge between users and developers to aid in fixing and closing bugs.
== Why Triage Bugs? ==
* The less time package maintainers have to spend resolving duplicates, attempting to reproduce bugs, and requesting missing information, the more time they can spend fixing bugs.
* Helps to identify bugs that should be fixed before release (adding to tracker and blocker lists)
* Gives bug reporters the feeling that someone has acknowledged their problem
* Strives to provide a level of certainty that the total number of open bugs is accurate
* Closing bugs for EOL releases helps keep Bugzilla tidy and useful, and lets reporters know they need to upgrade
* Identifying workarounds can help users in the meantime until a bug is fixed
* Provides an idea of where problem areas are in the distribution
* Good way to learn more about Fedora


== Steps to Triage a Bug ==
== Steps to Triage a Bug ==

Revision as of 11:30, 26 January 2014

Introduction

This document provides information on how to triage bugs for the Fedora project. Triaging is the name given for confirming, prioritizing, and organizing bug reports and is a good place for new contributors and/or contributors with limited programming abilities to help the Fedora project becoming a better distribution for everyone. Triaging is an incredibly important aspect of development that benefits users and developers alike by acting as a bridge between users and developers to aid in fixing and closing bugs.

Why Triage Bugs?

  • The less time package maintainers have to spend resolving duplicates, attempting to reproduce bugs, and requesting missing information, the more time they can spend fixing bugs.
  • Helps to identify bugs that should be fixed before release (adding to tracker and blocker lists)
  • Gives bug reporters the feeling that someone has acknowledged their problem
  • Strives to provide a level of certainty that the total number of open bugs is accurate
  • Closing bugs for EOL releases helps keep Bugzilla tidy and useful, and lets reporters know they need to upgrade
  • Identifying workarounds can help users in the meantime until a bug is fixed
  • Provides an idea of where problem areas are in the distribution
  • Good way to learn more about Fedora

Steps to Triage a Bug

This section lists the steps necessary in order to triage correctly. This guide aims to be concise, links in some sections will provide more information relevant to the particular step. The triage process can be essentially broken up into four parts, the first being "preparation" the second being "reproducing" the third being "prioritization" and the fourth being "upstreaming".

Summary of the steps involved

  • Find Bugs to Triage
  • Search for Duplicates of Bug(s)
  • Check Information Provided in Bug Report
  • Attempt to Reproduce Bug
  • Set Bug Status
  • Prioritize Bug
  • Notify Developers -- Needed only in very specific cases if bug seems to be a Blocker/Critical.
  • Upstream reports

Details of each step

Preparation

In general you'll always want to do the following steps in preparing to triage bugs.