Pesticide

If the software is the crop, bugs are indeed the, well, bugs. And as farmers, we’d like to avoid them as much as possible. Hence, bug trackers. This particular assignment wanted to teach us more about how open source communities keep track of the bug lifecycle and leverage one of the core tenets of open source software development – many eyes.

Case Study: GNOME

We were sent to explore the GNOME project’s accessibility bugs hosted on Bugzilla. There, we learned more about how the bug trackers label, categorise and track the tickets. From learning to define the bug’s status to tracking its resolution to noting its assignee was all done through the bug tracker.

One can recognise a useful bug tracker by its detailed reporting system and this project leveraged all of Bugzilla’s tools to explain what each category and label meant. I even studied a bug closely to uncover what the possible fix was. The details about its last updates and recent conversations not only reported its “fixability”, but also demonstrated how active the project is, and how the developers address a ticket throughout its life-cycle.

Health

Moreover, the bug tracker allowed immediate report generating that reflects the project’s overall health and tells a new developer whether or not it is worth investing their time into a project. A newcomer almost always assesses a project based on the bug tracker’s activities and Bugzilla manages to make that information readily available. Speaking of assessing projects, stay tuned.