Mozilla's 100,000th Bug 304
benb writes: "bugzilla.mozilla.org just hit bug 100,000 (cached). This proves its scalability. BugZilla is used to track work on Mozilla. Every change has to have a bug. This includes new features and bugs found by developers/testers during development (bugs that never reached users). We also get a lot of duplicates (which dedicated triagers sort out). So, the number of filed closed bugs cannot be used as criteria of the quality of Mozilla. During usage, BugZilla evolved to a very comfortable web platform for filing/tracking bugs, one that has only very few competition (of which I know). Examples are the emailing and dependency systems. In fact, BugZilla is probably the most important communication medium used in the Mozilla project (apart from the source code itself)."
Re:Bugzilla rocks, indeed. (Score:3, Informative)
However, I must caution that it's still a real pain to install on Microsoft Windows, and requires non-trivial UNIX knowledge to make work on a UNIX platform. Also, it's heavily geared towards Apache web server, since that's what B.M.O. uses and most of those admins running Bugzilla use it. AFAIK it still works fine on iPlanet and IIS, but you need to implement your own security to protect certain critical files from remote inspection. There's a file we use called "localconfig" which contains your database password; that file must not be readable by web users!
If you're an admin for an enterprise looking for a high-quality bug tracker, I highly recommend Bugzilla. If all you're looking to do is track bugs on a very small product, or if you're not an experienced admin on your platform of choice for Bugzilla, a mailing list is probably much more the thing for you. I love Bugzilla, but like most other enterprise-class software, it can be difficult to get up and configured correctly, particularly if you don't already have the necessary prerequisite packages already installed.
Re:Nothing to be proud about. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:On small problem I've had... (Score:2, Informative)
One of the part of bug triaging is to be sure that the component is the correct one.
Re:On small problem I've had... (Score:3, Informative)
The Bugzilla Installer (Score:2, Informative)
This article has detailed instructions and all required source code: The Bugzilla Installer [softwaretesting.de]
The Bugzilla Installer will unpack, compile and install Bugzilla and all required components on a UNIX system. Administrator rights are not required; you can install everything in an arbitrary location. It has been tested on different Sun Solaris and Linux installations.
Re:bugzilla vs. debian bug tracking vs. sourceforg (Score:3, Informative)
They all lack many essential features. They all have web-based GUIs that are tighly coupled with the back-end logic; that is, they have no back ends. Thus the default GUI is the only GUI you can ever realistically put on top of it. A lot of people are missing out on the MVC model these days. What you need is a programmable back end accessible through a cross-platform API (based on CORBA, SOAP, XML-RPC, UNO, anything that strikes your fancy). Then you can leverage the back-end support for clients. One can be a powerful reporting tool with graphing capabilities. Another one can be a wxWindows-based portable GUI for modern desktops. Another one can be a common-denominator HTML-based GUI for browsers. Etc.
Current GUIs are all crude and cluttered and obviously designed by programmers with no interface design background (and by that I don't mean graphical design, but functional design). Many are ad-hoc systems thrown together using PHP. Presumably the poor devils think that by slapping it on SourceForge or Freshmeat it will magically bloom into a usable product. Nuh-uh.
Another common problem with these systems is that they're fundamentally bug-tracking systems. When you get to a certain point in development, you realize that a better all-embracing concept is the idea of issues -- a generalization of problems that aren't specifically related to code. There is a popular fork of Bugzilla, for example, called IssueZilla [openoffice.org].
The only system that was mildly interesting was Keystone, which provides some interesting form-based extensibility -- basically, if I remember correctly, the schema is malleable, so you can add stuff like time estimation numbers, completion progress, or other metadata that would be useful in your project. Also Keystone supports the notion of subtasks: any bug "slip" can have another slip as its parent. This is more elegant than Bugzilla's dependency system. Unfortunately, Keystone sports a GUI from hell. (Applying CSS to it might sound fun, but it isn't; their HTML isn't very CSS-friendly, so to do anything radical you have to delve into their HTML generation code).
We currently use Bugzilla. It's currently the best system out there, but that doesn't say much. We are pretty excited about Scarab [tigris.org] -- this is a project where the developers actually sat down and designed it beforehand (wowee).
82,000 of 100,000 Bugzilla reports RESOLVED (Score:3, Informative)
The recent posting to slashdot about Bugzilla's 100,000th report begs the question, "what other numbers can you give me?" Here are a few of the numbers I pulled out of the database last night. These numbers are all a little rough but should help make the picture a little more clear. About 18.7% of the reports in Bugzilla are still open (UNCONFIRMED, NEW, ASSIGNED, and REOPENED) issues. About 32.8% of the reports have the FIXED Resolution. About 45.4% of the reports in the system are WORKSFORME, INVALID or DUPLICATE. To break that last number down a little more, 26.3% of the database is Resolved as DUPLICATE, 12% WORKSFORME and 7.5% INVALID. About 5.5% of reports in the system are reported against something other than the Mozilla application suite.
So just in case anyone missed it in the fine print, Bugzilla has 100,000+ reports but the Mozilla community has already resolved about 82,000 of those reports. It's probably also useful to know that there are over 32,000 Buzilla user accounts. You can find more on the Mozilla QA and testing community at my O'Reilly OSS Convention presentation [mozilla.org] (you'll want to use a browser that supports the latest web standards.)