Thunderbird Quality workshop : finding duplicates in bugzilla

Ludovic Hirlimann

Next Thursday, December second 2010 the people participating in quality assurance around Thunderbird will hold a workshop. The subject of the workshop will run around bugzilla and how to find duplicates.

Duplicates a little definition :

According to the dictionary
copied exactly from an original
identical
existing as a pair or in pairs; twofold
According to bugzilla

The problem is a duplicate of an existing bug. Marking a bug duplicate requires the bug# of the duplicating bug and will at least put that bug number in the description field.

Bugzilla statistics say that 40% of bugs end up being duplicates.

Goals

The goal of this workshop is to exchange on technique, tips and tricks on how to find and deal with duplicates. It should help :

Users

We want careful users to be able to find bugs they need to follow instead of entering new ones that will end up being marked as duplicate. We also think that with proper documentation it would make it easier to sign up to find and hunt duplicates.

Devs and Bugzilla contributors

We should be able to use the dupme whiteboard status more efficiently. With a better documentation , people that are already contributing to the bugzilla maintaining effort may become more efficient. And as written above one of the objectives is to be able to have more people finding dups.

Organization

The workshop will be held, Thursday December second 2010, in three sessions of one Hour/ two hours each:

  • 13:00 CET – so most people from Asia/Pacific can join.
  • 20:00 CET – so people from Europe/Middle-East/Africa can join.
  • 2:00 CET for People across North and Southern America.

Idea is to share the the way we do it, answer question for people who never did it and want to try join. The goal is to try to produce a simple documentation and make finding duplicates easier for everybody (I aim at something similar as Gary’s regression finding tutorial)

Communication and discussion will be done in English over irc in the #tb-qa channel. If that last sentence puzzles you just click here.

The documentation will be written as we go along the discussion. Writing will happen on Etherpad.