As of 2016, the BugZappers group is dormant and has been for some time. The content of this page and others related to BugZappers are preserved for historical reference and because some of the content is still useful and relevant, but the group is not active or holding meetings. To contact people active in Fedora testing, please visit #fedora-qa[?] or the test mailing list.
Who Are The BugZappers?
We are a group of volunteers and Red Hat employees whose primary mission is to review and triage bug report submissions on bugzilla.redhat.com, acting as a bridge between users and developers to aid in fixing and closing bugs.
Help Wanted
Triaging bugs helps package maintainers spend more time on actually fixing bugs, and provides needed assistance to other Fedora users. No programming knowledge is necessary, and triagers don't necessarily need to understand the bugs they are working on - just help others communicate about them. To find out more about why and how to become a BugZapper, see Joining.
Responsibilities
- Triage Fedora bugs in Bugzilla. Request missing information, verify correct component has been chosen, and close duplicates.
- Nominate "target" and "blocker" bugs (tracked here) that should be fixed before the next release, according to the release criteria.
- Perform housekeeping during release EOL ("End of Life") transitions in coordination with ReleaseEngineering.
- Identify and Document Common Bugs.
Tools and Procedures
- Bugzilla Primer : To better understand Bugzilla.
- Stock Responses : Know the Bugzilla terminology.
- Bug Lifecycle : From bug-report to closed.
- BugZappers' Tools : Contains several tools and scripts that are of use to BugZappers, including Greasemonkey scripts to make triaging quicker and easier.
- Components and Triagers : Tracking progress and who's working on what.
- Finding Bugs : Help including finding duplicate bugs.
- How to Triage : Includes checklists for use when triaging bugs.
- Housekeeping : Processes tied to the Fedora release cycle.
- How to test updates : Steps to create the necessary environment.
Communication
BugZappers meetings were held on every other Tuesday at 21:00 UTC (4 PM EST/1 PM PST) in #fedora-meeting[?] on freenode.net. See the UTC Howto for instructions to convert UTC to your local time.
Everyone is welcome, and we invite all to come and participate. IRC transcripts of previous meetings can be found here BugZappers Meetings.
You can also find us on #fedora-bugzappers[?], stop by and say hello and feel free to ask any questions you have. Also, you can keep up to date with what is going on in the BugZappers by subscribing to the test mailing list. Alternatively, the test-announce list carries only important event announcements, if you do not want the traffic of the full list.