bug writing guidelines

(Maintained by Gerv)
Please, no bug reports to this address

Are you in the right place?

These bug writing guidelines, and the Bugzilla bug tracking system found at bugzilla.mozilla.org, are for reporting bugs in mozilla.org open-source projects. If you‘ve found a bug using a Netscape-branded or Debian-branded product, please confirm that the bug also exists in a mozilla.org build before submitting it here.

Bugs reported against Netscape 6 or 7, Netscape Navigator, Netscape Communicator, or Debian products will be ignored.

Why You Should Read This

The Mozilla bug tracking system (Bugzilla) allows any interested individuals on the Internet to directly report and track bugs in mozilla.org open-source projects like the Mozilla Application Suite or Mozilla Firefox.

Like you, Mozilla QA (Quality Assurance) wants your bug reports to result in bug fixes; the more effectively a bug is reported, the more likely that an engineer will actually fix it.

By following these guidelines, you can help ensure that your bugs stay at the top of the Mozilla engineers‘ heap, and get fixed. Bugzilla is the preferred method of submitting a bug - the linked entry form incorporates parts of these guidelines.

How to Write a Useful Bug Report

Useful bug reports are ones that get bugs fixed. A useful bug report normally has two qualities:

1. Reproducible. If an engineer can‘t see it or conclusively prove that it exists, the engineer will probably stamp it WORKSFORME or INVALID, and move on to the next bug. Every relevant detail you can provide helps.
2. Specific. The quicker the engineer can isolate the issue to a specific problem, the more likely it‘ll be expediently fixed. If you‘re crashing on a site, please take the time to isolate what on the page is triggering the crash, and include it as an HTML snippet in the bug report if possible. (Specific bugs have the added bonus of remaining relevant when an engineer actually gets to them; in a rapidly changing web, a bug report of "foo.com crashes my browser" becomes meaningless after the site experiences a half-dozen redesigns and hundreds of content changes.)

Let‘s say you crash at foo.com, and want to write up a bug report:

BAD: "My browser crashed. I think I was on foo.com. I think that this is a really bad problem and you should fix it or else nobody will use your browser. By the way, my sister thinks your icons really suck. Oh, and my mom‘s home page doesn‘t look right, either, it‘s all messed up. Thx 4 fixing theze bugz."

GOOD: "I crashed each time when I went to foo.com, using Mozilla on a Win NT 4.0 (Service Pack 5) system. The build ID is 20030609. I also rebooted into Linux, and reproduced this problem using the 20030608 Linux build.

Mozilla crashed each time upon drawing the Foo banner at the top of the page. I broke apart the page, and discovered that the following image link will crash Mozilla reproducibly, unless you remove the "border=0" attribute:

How to Enter your Useful Bug Report into Bugzilla

Before you enter your bug, you need to make sure it has not been previously reported. There is a tutorial on the best ways of doing this.

Next, be sure that you‘ve reproduced your bug using a build released within the past three days. Our development process moves at lightning speed, and the bug you‘ve found may already have been fixed. (Nightly builds can be downloaded from the mozilla.org binaries page.)

If you‘ve discovered a new bug using a current build, report it in the guided Bugzilla entry form.

1. Are you sure you don‘t want to use the guided form? :-) You won‘t have to read the rest of this page if you do...
2. OK, then. From the Bugzilla main page (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org), choose "Enter a new bug".
3. Select the product that you‘ve found a bug in.
4. If you haven‘t logged into Bugzilla already, you‘ll need to enter your email address, password, and press the "Login" button. (If you don‘t yet have a password, enter your email address below and press the "Submit Request" button instead. You‘ll receive an email message with your password shortly.)

Now, fill out the form. Here‘s what it all means:

Where did you find the bug?

Product: In which product did you find the bug?
You just filled this out on the last page.

Version: In which product version did you find the bug?
We‘re not yet using this field. Just leave the default value as you found it. ;)

Component: In which component does the bug exist?
Bugzilla requires that you select a component to enter a bug. (If they all look meaningless, click on the Component link, which links to descriptions of each component, to help you make the best choice.)

Platform: On which hardware platform did you find this bug? (e.g. Macintosh, SGI, Sun, PC.)
If you know the bug happens on all hardware platforms, choose ‘All‘. Otherwise, select the platform that you found the bug on, or "Other" if your platform isn‘t listed.

OS: On which Operating System (OS) did you find this bug? (e.g. Linux, Windows NT, Mac OS X)
If you know the bug happens on all OSs, choose ‘All‘. Otherwise, select the OS that you found the bug on, or "Other" if your OS isn‘t listed.

Overview Description: More detailed expansion of summary.

Drag-selecting any page crashes Mac OS X builds in NSGetFactory

Steps to Reproduce: The minimal set of steps necessary to trigger the bug. Include any special setup steps.

1) View any web page. (I used the default sample page, resource:/res/samples/test0.html)

2) Drag-select the page. (Specifically, while holding down the mouse button, drag the mouse pointer downwards from any point in the browser‘s content region to the bottom of the browser‘s content region.)

Actual Results: What the application did after performing the above steps.

The application crashed. Stacktrace appended below from gdb.

Expected Results: What the application should have done, were the bug not present.

The window should scroll downwards. Scrolled content should be selected. (Or, at least, the application should not crash.)

Build Date & Platform: Date and platform of the build that you first encountered the bug in. (The build date can be found as part of the window title, in YYYYMMddHH format.)

2003060709 installer build on Mac OS X

Additional Builds and Platforms: Whether or not the bug takes place on other platforms or browsers.

- Occurs On Seamonkey (20030605 build on Windows 2000)

- Doesn‘t Occur On Seamonkey (20030602 build on Suse Linux), IE 6 (Windows XP), Netscape Navigator 4.5 (Mac OS)