Software bugs

Allied Testing hosts a page linking to over a hundred bug tracking systems.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Callum McKenzie notes that bug opening rates rates equal bug fixing rates in gnome-games, but Luis Villa’s experience is that that’s how bug statistics work in Free Software.

Popularity: 45% [?]

The GNOME project has a Desktop Integration Bounty Hunt.

Popularity: 57% [?]

Netscape have a security bug bounty page.

Popularity: 57% [?]

The Debian QA team hunt down and fix bugs in Debian packages, among other things. Most activity seems to be coordinated via their mailing list.

Popularity: 53% [?]

Clint Jeffery maintains the Algorithmic and Automatic Debugging Home Page, an extensive collection of links to research on, and researchers working on, automatic debugging.

Popularity: 33% [?]

… you will find them” is the moral of Federico Mena-Quintero’s quick bug finding story.

Popularity: 32% [?]

The KDE Community Wiki site has a guide to getting involved by helping out with bug triaging. It also contains more useful tips regarding making a good bug report.

Popularity: 63% [?]

php.net has some tips (some are Bugzilla specific) for handling bug reports at the bug-fixer end.

Popularity: 38% [?]

Paolo Bonzini gives Debugging: The Nine Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems by David J. Agans a positive review in his advogato diary.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Telsa sent a link to her Making the right sort of difference: bugs and what to do with them summary from her talk at linux.conf.au 2003.

She writes that she has recently had an opportunity to confirm that bug numbers are increased by an approaching deadline…

It covered a lot of material: finding bugs, reporting bugs and getting people to fix bugs for you.

You can also find an Ogg Speex audio recording of the talk at planetmirror (Australia only) or on the LCA 2003 ISO image distributed by various mirrors (see the linux.conf.au 2003 site).

Popularity: 58% [?]

… or why your browser bug didn’t get fixed.

Via Malcolm again, Dave Hyatt describes ways not to get your bugs fixed and the sheer number of potential browser bugs.

Popularity: 51% [?]

Via Malcolm’s diary, Joe Bork, a Microsoft software tester, writes about known bugs that go unfixed and the cost of fixing a bug (salary costs, regression testing, testing the fix and so on).

Popularity: 48% [?]

Malcolm sent a link to a Gamasutra case study [registration required] discussing a commerical game company’s experience using Bugzilla for bug tracking, and describes integrating Bugzilla with third party applications.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Via the Mozilla QA team’s page: bug writing guidelines for Mozilla and Bugzilla etiquette.

Popularity: 35% [?]

The Mozilla QA team finds, researches and reports bugs in the Mozilla projects.

Popularity: 45% [?]

The GNOME Bugsquad are the team who track current GNOME bugs.

They also have several resources for bug hunters including their own Bugzilla guide and a guide to triaging bugs.

Popularity: 59% [?]

The Roundup Issue Tracker can be used as a bug tracking system. It is somewhat simpler than Bugzilla (I don’t think, for example, that it tracks dependencies or has a security system), but nevertheless includes web, email, command line and Python interfaces.

Roundup users include Twisted and opened hand.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Bugzilla is a bug tracking system originally released by Netscape for use in the Mozilla project. It’s quite large and has a lot of features oriented towards projects with large numbers of developers: its own security schema, dependency checking, that kind of thing. It also has a bunch of interfaces including email, although the web interface is the bet know.

Other users of Bugzilla include Red Hat, Mandrake, Ximian, Gentoo and Samba.

Popularity: 30% [?]

The last time this site was active (2000), Eli Goldberg sent me a link to bug writing guidelines. The guide has some general tips and also some specific tips for reporting bugs with Bugzilla.

He also sent a guide to text searching in Bugzilla and to bug triaging in Bugzilla.

Popularity: 35% [?]