Bugzilla is an application which can be used by firms to detect and get rid of bugs in their products or softwares. Using Bugzilla developers can keep a track of bugs in their products effectively. Most of the applications developed for similar purpose come for a huge amount of fee but this application developed by Mozilla is totally free and has many features that other heavily priced defect detection applications may lack. Bugzilla is used by many organizations today to keep a check on the bugs.

Bugzilla makes it easy to manage the quality of your software or program, track changes in the code, review patches and communication with the team mates. Bugzilla can prove to be very helpful in the software development process. Bugzilla would help your team get organized and communicate with your team effectively. Bugzilla is constantly under test by the Mozilla foundation and has a good support team. Bugzilla is trusted by many world leading technology companies. It can be installed on many operating systems like Windows, Linux and Mac. Bugzilla is known to reduce the downtime and increase customer satisfaction, increasing the productivity and improving communication of the team working on the project.

Setting Up Bugzilla

It is one of the most well known open source defect tracking and management system used by Eclipse, Mozilla and many linux distributions. One can install it on Unix or Linux environment and runs on Perl, using MySQL or PostgreSQl as backing database. A web server is also required Apache would be a good choice. Installing necessary Perl modules and setting up the databases is required to set up the Bugzilla software from the command line.

Searching and Fixing The Bugs

Bugzilla has user friendly and powerful search features which is capable of detecting thousands of bugs and you can search for existing issues using keyword based search even advanced search option can be used to filter any database fields.

The bugs which cannot be reproduced are the toughest bugs to fix. A bugzilla guided bug submission process which allows a developer to gather facts and have enough information to reproduce the bug. Bugzilla will ask the submitter to provide information which is of importance to the developer and a proper fact gathering process results in an on-time resolution of a bug.

Features

• One can get email notifications for changes in the code.
• List of bugs can be generated and in different formats.
• You can schedule daily, weekly and monthly reports.
• Reports and charts generated based upon the database.
• Can detect duplicate bugs automatically.
• Can estimate the time a bug may get fixed in or can keep a track of time while you fix a bug.
• Patch viewer gives a colourful and nice view of any patch attached to the bug.
• Bugzilla has the ability to streamline the process of detection and resolution of a bug forming a logical way of bug resolution.
• Supports resolution dependencies as resolution of a bug may depend upon resolution of another bug preceding it.
• You can set bug priorities by involving customers and knowing which tickets are more important to them.
• You can restrict access to a group of engineers or a single ticket depending upon your preferences.
• You can save your search for bugs and you can use the combinations of OS, Email Address, Keyword in Ticket text, Software component, Software Version, Assigned Engineer , Bug severity, Platform and Priority.
• You can also add trace or inputs as an attachment to the ticket. These traces and data may contain information regarding the causes of the error.

These features make this tool powerful and though it has a never ending or extensive list of features, these were some of the important one’s which make Bugzilla the most quick and efficient bug tracking tool.

Bugzilla includes reporting and charting features one can implement charts, tables and to display graph of data over a time frame all you need to set up are some special data sets which would collect the data on a regular basis.

Bugzilla supports large projects and you can handle multiple projects at the same time by grouping different related projects into one category using the classification option and you can define components. One can assist project management and quality assurance by defining various versions, milestones and release versions.

Logging into Bugzilla

After installing the application to your dashboard you can login using these credentials

Username: admin@example.com
Password: password

it is recommended that you change the username and password after you login for the first time.

Setting parameters on Bugzilla

To set up parameters on Bugzilla you need to click on administration and then on parameters. you can now add the email address of the person who’ll be managing your application.

How does it work?

Bugzilla involves creating new bugs and moving them through a series of states which are decided by the developer. Each state change records data within the bug record and this can be reviewed or reported at some later date.

The process involves creation of bugs,assigning or resolving them. The assigned bugs are either resolved or changes are made to their ownership. Now, resolved bugs can be verified, closed or re-opened. The re-opened bugs are again possessed by the developer and the bug is assigned again or gets resolved by the developer.

The state of the verified bugs can be changes to Re-opened, Unconfirmed or Closed states depending upon the bug is whether fixed or is sporadic. The closed bugs can also be reopened or Unconfirmed when it is hard to trigger the error. Unconfirmed bugs can be confirmed, new, assigned or resolved.

• Track bugs efficiently using @bugzilla – the most reliable bug tracking tool. www.bugzilla.org/ via @supermonitoring

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Bugzilla is one of the best bug tracking tools available today. It helps to improve the customer developer communication and ensures that the productivity is increased by a well managed bug life cycle from the submission until the bug is resolved.Proper administration of bugs will lead to a quality product, satisfied customer, and a productive team. Bugzilla would help the developing team to reach their goals on time and delivering a quality product.

Try using Bugzilla to detect bugs on your products and do let us know about your experience in the comments.