Bug management/Bugzilla usage

This page documents how the Bugmeister uses Bugzilla.

Background

Wikimedia uses Bugzilla to record problem reports and feature requests for Wikipedia, other Wikimedia wikis, MediaWiki, MediaWiki extensions, and a variety of other products. A full-time Bugmeister is employed by the Wikimedia Foundation to triage the bug reports and ensure issues that should be addressed are not ignored.

If you run into problems or need help with Bugzilla, the best place to ask, after checking the documentation here, is probably the wikitech-l mailing list.

Priority

This section documents how the Bugmeister uses the "priority" field within Bugzilla.

As of February 2011, the Bugmeister has decided to use priority to help him manage the queue of bugs. A large part of the reason for this is that people went out of their way to say that priority wasn't really used in their own development work.

Priority	Meaning
highest	needs to be fixed ASAP, a week at the most
high	should be fixed within the next month
normal	should be fixed in this quarter, or by the next release
low	we should get to this within 6 months, or the release after next
lowest	This can be fixed, but we're not going to worry about it. Patches accepted.

In addition, “Unprioritized” was added as the default priority level in April 2011. If this is the priority level on a bug, then the bugmeister is either not concerned with it (e.g. Semantic Wiki items are tracked in Bugzilla, but the bugmeister does not set priority on those items) or hasn't seen it.

Severity

This section documents how the Bugmeister uses the "severity" field within Bugzilla.

Severity	Meaning
blocker	Other bugs can't be fixed until this one is.
critical	This bug affects a vital component of MediaWiki.
major	Bug affects an area of MediaWiki that is important on WMF sites.
normal	Bug affects everyone.
minor	Bug that bothers a few people.
trivial	This is a bug, but it doesn't really cause problems.
enhancement	A feature request.

See also

• Bugzilla/Fields