The BugZappers group is dormant at present: no-one is organizing BugZappers activity and there is little active triage happening. This enrolment process is currently inactive. This page is maintained for reference, but the specific instructions on joining the group have been hidden for now. We encourage you to look at other active areas of QA work or Fedora contribution if you are interested in helping the Fedora project. We would like to see triage re-emerge as an active area of work for the QA team: please contact QA if you are interesting in helping with this.
What is Involved in Bug Triaging?
Bug triagers make sure that:
- Bug reports have the information developers need to reproduce and fix them.
- Bugs are assigned to the right component and version.
- Duplicate bugs are found and labelled.
- Feature requests reported as bugs are properly reported.
- Bugs already fixed are closed.
Triagers mostly work alone on any particular bug, but you may work together with others to cover a large component. We have weekly meetings where we get together to discuss wider issues, and help each other out with tricky problems. There is also a mailing list where triagers can raise any questions or problems they are having for help from others. Experienced triagers are happy to act as mentors for new triagers to help them get started in the project.
Triaging bugs does not mean that you have to understand bugs and solve them yourself. It means you should be able to look at new bugs, and report if they are duplicates, if more information is needed, or if it is filed under the wrong component.
There is no requirement of programming knowledge. However, being familiar with Fedora and Linux in general will be extremely useful.
This is purely voluntary. We do not expect you to spend hours here every day. (Though if you want to, you're more than welcome!) You can triage bugs whenever you have free time. You can spend as little as 15 minutes a week - every little bit helps!
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
How to Start Triaging
- See BugZappers/Tools to get tools recommended for all BugZappers, including Greasemonkey scripts which will make the process easier.
- See BugZappers/FindingBugs to get a list of bugs to work on.
- See BugZappers/How to Triage for instructions.