Bug management/status

Last update on: 2013-10-15

2011-05-01
Mark Hershberger reached out to other open-source communities (like Mozilla) to look for best practices in bug management and workflow; he started to experiment with a new "unprioritized" value for the "priority" field. He has also been organizing weekly bug triage sessions at different times to allow for participation from different timezones.

2011-06-01
Mark Hershberger continued his efforts to watch, assign and resolve bugs, notably by leading the bug squashing sessions at the Berlin Hackathon; more than 50 bugs where closed. He also worked with Priyanka Dhanda to get meaningful reports and metrics out of bugzilla.

2011-07-01
Mark Hershberger continued to conduct bug triages to surface issues that require attention or decisions; in June, these meetings switched from phone to IRC to improve transparency and accessibility to the rest of the community. After helping developers wrap up the 1.17 tarball, Mark started looking at 1.18 bugs, and led a triage to narrow down the list of open bugs blocking deployment of MediaWiki 1.18 on Wikimedia Foundation sites. He also worked on several concerns raised by the community, such as enabling "International" numerals on Hindi wiki with Priyanka Dhanda's help, and right-to-left and extension bundling issues.

2011-07-25
Mark Hershberger continued to conduct bug triage sessions on IRC, some of which were focused on MediaWiki 1.18 blockers, thumbnails issues, caching and operations-related requests. With Sumana Harihareswara, he cleaned up default assignees in bugzilla in order for assignments to be more meaningful, which prompted a discussion on the wikitech-l list.

2011-08-31
Mark Hershberger held bug triage sessions on Mobile & PDF export/Collections. The bug triage page now lists past and upcoming triages, as well as notes and summaries when available.

2011-09-30
Mark Hershberger continued to hold thematic bug triage sessions; in September, those focused on UploadWizard, Internationalization and Wikibooks & Wikisource. A calendar of upcoming triages is now available. He also reached out to people directly by e-mail to remind them of FIXMEs that were assigned to them. An upcoming focus on his work will be the patches submitted via Bugzilla.

2011-10-31
Mark Hershberger continued to hold themed bug triage sessions; in October, those focused on Fundraiser engineering and the new Wikipedia Android app. Two ad-hoc triages, on shell requests and 1.18 regressions, happened during the New Orleans hackathon. Mark also worked with members of the "MediaWiki Core" group to better identify "highest priority" bugs in Bugzilla and continued to prioritize and respond to new bug reports.

2011-11-02
Sumana Harihareswara led a bug triage on non-MySQL databases (summary, raw notes).

2011-11-30
<section begin=2011-11-30 />In November, Mark Hershberger and Sumana Harihareswara led themed bug triage sessions focusing on non-MySQL databases, MediaWiki 1.18 bugs, and UploadWizard. A session was also dedicated to reviewing patches in bugzilla; volunteer Rusty Burchfield wrote a tool to check if the patches could be applied to trunk, and only 50 were not obsolete due to bitrot. Mark watched for bugs and comments on local village pumps following the deployment of MediaWiki 1.18 to Wikimedia sites. He also continued to prioritize bugs and find developers to address those of highest priority.<section end=2011-11-30 />

2011-12-31
<section begin=2011-12-31/>Mark Hershberger followed up on MediaWiki 1.18 bugs, and wrote a FAQ listing issues and offering solutions until 1.18.1 is released. Mark also continued to go through "highest priority" bugs, dealt with bugzilla vandalism, reviewed patches submitted in bugzilla, and held bug triages on MediaWiki 1.18 and Fundraising engineering.<section end=2011-12-31/>

2012-01-31
<section begin=2012-01-31/>In January, Mark Hershberger worked with developers to prepare for the (planned) 1.19 deployment in February. He worked with volunteers to launch the beta cluster and held a triage to review 1.19 deployment blockers. The beta cluster has already begun to show some promise with the bugs it has helped reveal.<section end=2012-01-31/>

2012-02-29
<section begin=2012-02-29/>Mark Hershberger has been using the 1.19 deployment cycle to work with on-wiki editors to find and fix bugs as the deployment cycle goes on. Through the connections that he makes, he hopes to use these relationships during future deployments to make them smoother.<section end=2012-02-29/>

2012-03-31
<section begin=2012-03-31/>Mark Hershberger started gathering volunteers to take part in the Bug Squad to help triage bugs.<section end=2012-03-31/>

2012-04-monthly
<section begin=2012-04-monthly/>Mark Hershberger used the deployment of MediaWiki 1.20wmf1 to gather volunteers for the Bug Squad. He has begun working with volunteers on IRC to coordinate bug-grooming activities.<section end=2012-04-monthly/>

2012-05-monthly
<section begin="2012-05-monthly"/>Mark Hershberger wrote a triaging guide and the Engineering Community Team is now encouraging volunteers to use it to respond to new bugs.<section end="2012-05-monthly"/>

2012-06-monthly
<section begin="2012-06-monthly"/>The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Bug Wrangler to work on management of bugs.<section end="2012-06-monthly"/>

2012-07-03
<section begin=2012-07-03/>The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Bug Wrangler to work on management of bugs.<section end=2012-07-03/>

2012-07-monthly
<section begin="2012-07-monthly"/>The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Bug Wrangler to work on management of bugs.<section end="2012-07-monthly"/>

2012-08-monthly
<section begin="2012-08-monthly"/>The Wikimedia Foundation is nearing the end of its hiring process for a new Bug Wrangler, who will lead triage activities and train volunteers to triage as well. In the interim, volunteers such as Krenair and Thehelpfulone have stepped in to partially fill the gap. Volunteer Matanya Moses is planning to lead an online bug triage meeting, focusing on unreviewed patches, on September 5th.<section end="2012-08-monthly"/>

2012-10-11
<section begin="2012-10-11"/>Andre Klapper joined the WMF as Bug Wrangler (announcement) on 8 October. He is first concentrating on finding, consolidating, and triaging bugs relating to MediaWiki 1.21 deployments, and on improving the documentation around handling bug reports.<section end="2012-10-11"/>

2012-10-19
<section begin="2012-10-19"/>Andre Klapper, Sumana Harihareswara, and Daniel Zahn discussed the necessary prerequisites to upgrading bugzilla.wikimedia.org, which is currently at version 4.0.6, to 4.2.3. We have 4 possible approaches:


 * 1) Do nothing right now because it's not urgent, and check again in 3 months. We believe we've hotfixed all the crucial problems between 4.0.6 and now; if that's the case, we will likely choose this option.
 * 2) If there's an urgent need to upgrade NOW, grab the tarball, unpack it live, and pray. Andre is checking whether our current version as installed urgently needs upgrading, in which case Ops (most likely Daniel) will do this.
 * 3) Find or create a Debian package suitable for installing on Precise, write the necessary Puppet four-liner, and deploy that way.  Andre has some packaging experience and we can get help elsewhere in our community & WMF if we go this route.
 * 4) Puppetize all of Bugzilla and deploy that way.  We probably do not have enough spare time among Puppet domain experts at WMF and in our community to do this soon, so it's the least likely right now, even though ideally it's the best and most sustainable path.

Andre is investigating and will be leading the upgrade effort, no matter what option we choose.

Update 30 minutes later: We've live-upgraded to 4.0.8, which is old-stable (has all the current security fixes), so now Andre is going to investigate how much functionality we want (and how urgently) that would require a major upgrade.<section end="2012-10-19"/>

2012-10-monthly
<section begin="2012-10-monthly"/>New Bug Wrangler Andre Klapper had many discussions with different stakeholders to get a better impression of how work is done, how people interact with the bug tracker, what the expectations are and what policies might be needed. He investigated the product/component organization within bugzilla, started triaging incoming and older reports, and did maintenance work (creation and partial cleanup of products and components). bugzilla.wikimedia.org was upgraded to 4.0.8 with the help of Daniel Zahn, and investigations started to determine how urgent an upgrade to 4.2 was with regard to functionality improvements. Plans for the next month include improving documentation on bug management and bug triaging, and describing interactions between the bug wrangler and the different teams.<section end="2012-10-monthly"/>

2012-11-06
<section begin="2012-11-06"/>In the past week, aside from the usual triaging, Andre updated some bug triage and Bugzilla documentation, published his Greasemonkey scripts in a Git repository, went through obsolete extensions and updated their BZ descriptions.

This week, Andre will follow up on the process for collaborating with product managers and teams (including expectations and workflows with bugs), and on "undeploying" (removing) deployed extensions from WMF sites.<section end="2012-11-06"/>

2012-11-13
<section begin="2012-11-13"/>Andre continued working on standardizing Bugzilla components, documenting the bug workflow, and triaging bugs. He especially investigated thumbnailing and search issues. Andre also started contacting WMF engineering teams to consult with them on how they use Bugzilla.

Andre is also considering an ECT yearly goal of reducing the rate of growth of new bugs or changing the velocity of our new Bugzilla issues growth.<section end="2012-11-13"/>

2012-11-20
<section begin="2012-11-20"/>Andre massively cleaned up and improved the bug management documentation on Bug management and its subpages. He started a discussion on standardizing the meaning of "highest priority" in Bugzilla, investigated the use of groups in Bugzilla and also committed an upgrade of his bugtriage scripts to the code repository. Furthermore, Bugzilla was upgraded to version 4.0.9 by Daniel Zahn.<section end="2012-11-20"/>

2012-11-27
<section begin="2012-11-27"/>Andre mostly spent the week with Bugzilla gruntwork (adding extensions, people to bugmail, triaging) and continuing tasks from the previous week, such as improving the bug management documentation and keeping an eye on the discussion on standardizing the meaning of "highest priority" in Bugzilla. He also investigated upgrading Bugzilla to version 4.2 by some basic testing.<section end="2012-11-27"/>

2012-11-monthly
<section begin="2012-11-monthly"/>Andre Klapper improved and cleaned up updated large parts of the bug management and Bugzilla documentation. This includes the beginnings of a triage guide. He also published his Greasemonkey scripts in a Git repository and went through obsolete extensions and updated their Bugzilla descriptions. Andre started analyzing how Wikimedia engineering teams use Bugzilla and their related workflows. He also investigated a potential upgrade of Bugzilla to version 4.2 by doing some basic testing. Furthermore, a wikitech-l discussion on standardizing the meaning of "highest priority" in Bugzilla resulted in creating a new "Immediate" priority status.<section end="2012-11-monthly"/>

2012-12-11
<section begin="2012-12-11"/>Daniel Zahn and Andre Klapper upgraded Wikimedia Bugzilla to the latest stable version (4.2.4) which provides higher flexibility for displaying interface elements, improved custom search, better JSON-RPC support and a solid base for future improvements being considered. Andre looked after reports about CSS issues after the MediaWiki 1.21 wmf5 deployment, continued to improve bug management related documentation, and did usual gruntwork (triaging, creating requested Bugzilla components, etc.)<section end="2012-12-11"/>

2012-12-18
<section begin="2012-12-18"/>In the last week smaller regex fixes got deployed in Bugzilla to fix automatic linking to Gerrit changesets (bug 40344, bug 41321). Discussions took place on wikitech-l mailing list about a "patch in gerrit" bug status, with the ops team about the situation of RT, and with the Wikidata team about automatic notifications (comments) from Gerrit into Bugzilla about patch status changes. Also, the amount of bug reports that are resolved as RESOLVED LATER was decreased by about 100 tickets, in order to get rid of that resolution in the long run, and also a number of unprioritized bug reports received a priority setting.<section end="2012-12-18"/>

2012-12-monthly
<section begin="2012-12-monthly"/>Daniel Zahn and Andre Klapper upgraded Bugzilla to the latest stable version (4.2.4) which provides higher flexibility for displaying interface elements, improved custom search, better JSON-RPC support and a solid base for future improvements being considered. Andre continued to improve the bug management documentation. Many bug reports that were previously closed as RESOLVED LATER were retriaged and RESOLVED LATER was disabled for future use, and a large number of previously unprioritized bug reports received a priority setting. Furthermore, Andre looked after reports about CSS issues after the MediaWiki 1.21wmf5 deployment and followed up by triaging, creating requested Bugzilla components, etc. Several smaller regex fixes were deployed in Bugzilla to fix automatic linking to Gerrit changesets. A "patch in gerrit" bug status was discussed on wikitech-l with the conclusion to wait for automatic notifications (comments) from Gerrit into Bugzilla about patch status changes first (which is being worked on by the Wikidata team).<section end="2012-12-monthly"/>

2013-01-03
<section begin="2013-01-03"/>Apart from usual work, Andre prioritized a bigger number of previously unprioritized bug reports and worked on a new Bugzilla frontpage (bug report, code patch).<section end="2013-01-03"/>

2013-01-08
<section begin="2013-01-08"/>Apart from usual gruntwork (triaging bug reports, administration tasks) Andre worked on some smaller patches ("Zarro Boogs found" - bug 42467), Show "email" instead of "login" - bug 24992), removed Bugzilla admins by default from Bugzilla's bz_sudoers group (bug 43619), and listed Bugzilla admins on the meta wiki (https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=System_administrators&diff=4983653&oldid=4948113). He also triaged some more unprioritized bug reports.<section end="2013-01-08"/>

2013-01-17
<section begin="2013-01-17"/>Andre Klapper continued decreasing the amount of unprioritized reports in Bugzilla and triaged most of those open reports that had been in ASSIGNED status for more than a year (high likeliness of the assignee having forgotten to reset the status). Information on the different usages of Bugzilla per development team were published. Community members were invited to join the MediaWiki Group Bug Squad. Also, the first translations for How to report a bug we received. Finally, the meaning of the Bugzilla "Priority" field was slightly adjusted to better reflect reality.<section end="2013-01-17"/>

2013-01-22
<section begin="2013-01-22"/>Apart from general triaging, administration work and reducing the amount of open unprioritized reports, an announcement for a bugday on January 29th was published. Furthermore, smaller preparations for the upcoming Datacenter migration have taken place.<section end="2013-01-22"/>

2013-01-23
<section begin="2013-01-23"/>Handling some smaller Data Center move aftermath issues; also clarified "patch-need-review", "patch-reviewed" keyword meaning in Bugzilla to explicitly EXCLUDE patches in Gerrit, so search results are less noisy. "patch-need-review" was historically called "need-review", not implying existence of a patch, but also "this extension needs a review before we could deploy it" and other similar interpretations. Also checked if extensions were deployed in the meantime and made requests block bug 31235 whenever appropriate.<section end="2013-01-23"/>

2013-01-29
<section begin="2013-01-29"/>As part of the usual work, triaging of incoming reports, investigations on various bug reports (especially datacenter migration aftermath, and thumbnail cache purging issues) and threads on various forums (Village Pumps etc.); continued reducing of the backlog of unprioritized tickets; and Bugzilla maintenance (e.g. adding a Bugzilla component for "Wikimedia Planet") were done. Andre went through some "extension deployment" requests to check if still applicable while clarifying the meanings of the "patch-need-review", "patch-reviewed" keyword meaning in Bugzilla. Furthermore, it was discussed how to improve interaction on Bugzilla tickets that need handling by the ops team (which mostly prefers to use the RT bugtracker instead).<section end="2013-01-29"/>

2013-01-monthly
<section begin="2013-01-monthly"/>This month, a first bugday was held, targeting bug reports which had not seen any changes for more than one year, resulting in about 30 tickets being updated. In addition, some cleanup work (decreasing the number of unprioritized bug reports and going through open reports in "ASSIGNED" status for more than a year) took place. Andre Klapper worked on small Bugzilla code changes and published initial information on Bugzilla usage per development team. Community members were invited to join the MediaWiki Group Bug Squad. Furthermore, some problems due to data center migration were investigated, and it was discussed how to improve interaction on Bugzilla tickets that need handling by the Operations team (who mostly prefers to use the RT bugtracker instead).<section end="2013-01-monthly"/>

2013-02-12
<section begin="2013-02-12"/>Andre continued the number of unprioritized bug reports and reached out to several development teams to better understand their use of "Priority" in the Bugzilla issue tracker and who should set it. Furthermore some triaging of ArticleFeedback reports has taken place. Valerie summarized the latest bugday and published an initial version of a describing the life of a bug report by its status changes over time.<section end="2013-02-12"/>

2013-02-19
<section begin="2013-02-19"/>Valerie prepared the next Bugday about Git/Gerrit triage and announced it. Andre continued reducing the number of unprioritized Bugzilla tickets and contacted several development teams, made small improvements to Bugday related documentation on the wiki, and announced the availability of a table on Bugzilla use by development teams. Furthermore, discussions are ongoing about a workflow how to mark fixed tickets as backport candidates in Bugzilla, likely via flags.<section end="2013-02-19"/>

2013-02-26
<section begin="2013-02-26"/>As part of the Weekly QA Goals, a Git/Gerrit Bug Triage day took place. About 25 open reports were retested and/or synchronized with their status in the upstream bugtracker. The Bug day format will be developed further to make it more attractive to new contributors. Valerie helped in testing the Commons Upload app for Android and the mobile browser as part of Mobile QA testing this week. In the context of the OTRS support discussion on the wikimedia-l mailing list, Andre retriaged the open OTRS tickets in Bugzilla, in order to get a better and up-to-date overview of OTRS' bugs. Furthermore, discussions how to mark bug reports which are fixed in the development branch as backport candidates for MediaWiki's stable release branch took place, potentially resulting in the addition of a dropdown menu ("flag") in Wikimedia Bugzilla.<section end="2013-02-26"/>

2013-02-monthly
<section begin="2013-02-monthly"/>As part of the Weekly QA Goals, a Git/Gerrit Bug Triage day took place. About 25 open reports were retested and/or synchronized with their status in the upstream bugtracker. The Bug day format will be developed further to make it more attractive to new contributors. Valerie published an initial version of a describing the life of a bug report by its status changes over time, continued investigating feedback channels and workflows of other bigger free software projects, and also helped testing the Commons Upload app for Android and the mobile browser as part of Mobile QA testing. A table on Bugzilla use by development teams was made available. Furthermore, reachout to several development teams continued to better understand the different bug management needs, and discussions took place about a workflow how to mark fixed tickets as backport candidates in the issue tracker, potentially resulting in the addition of a dropdown menu ("flag") in Bugzilla.<section end="2013-02-monthly"/>

2013-03-12
<section begin="2013-03-12"/>In Bugzilla, a way to mark bugfixes to copy from the development branch to stable branches was introduced to easier identify important bugfixes to include in tarball releases. Valerie analyzed which important Wikimedia feedback channels link to each other and Bugzilla and created a. Andre starting improving the Bugzilla Weekly Report email to the wikitech mailing list to improve its accuracy and usefulness. Improving the usage of Bugzilla and handling of bug reports by specific teams, regular meetings with members of the Operations team, the Release manager and the Language Engineering team have started, with further outreach to take place in the next weeks. Furthermore, bugday to clean up and retest General MediaWiki reports took place which resulted in 38 updated reports and two volunteers who triaged reports for the first time. Some bug reports about Scribunto and Search issues were triaged.<section end="2013-03-12"/>

2013-03-19
<section begin="2013-03-19"/>This week, the number of unprioritized MediaWiki enhancement requests in Bugzilla was decreased further, and a patch to enhance the Weekly Bugzilla Report on wikitech-l mailing list by including a list of urgent issues was written. Furthermore, Valerie published a blog post explaining how to create a good first bug report.<section end="2013-03-19"/>

2013-03-26
<section begin="2013-03-26"/>This week, Valerie ran a bugday on the LiquidThreads extension as part of the QA Weekly Goals. 76 (out of initially 218) open LiquidThreads reports received an update in the last week. Valerie also published a blogpost on how to help Wikimedia squash software bugs. A first IRC Office Hour on Bugzilla and Bug management took place for anybody interested in discussing problems and improvements with Wikimedia's bug management. On most open bug reports with a target milestone set to future MediaWiki version 1.21.0, Andre added reminder comments for developers. In Bugzilla's internal product and component taxonomy, several Mobile application products were merged into a single "Wikipedia App" product and two Search components were merged, both to simplify finding information for developers and reporters. Furthermore, the bug management task list received a major cleanup, making it easier for contributors to find tasks to work on.<section end="2013-03-26"/>

2013-03-monthly
<section begin="2013-03-monthly"/>In Bugzilla, a way to mark bugfixes to copy from the development branch to stable branches was introduced to easier identify important bugfixes to include in tarball releases. Two bugdays took place as part of the QA Weekly Goals: cleaning up and retesting General MediaWiki reports and a bugday concentrating on the LiquidThreads extension. For the latter, 76 out of 218 open reports received updates. Valerie analyzed which important Wikimedia feedback channels link to each other and Bugzilla, and created a. Valerie also published two blogposts explaining how to create a good first bug report and how to help Wikimedia squash software bugs. Andre improved the Bugzilla Weekly Report email to the wikitech mailing list. On most open bug reports with a target milestone set to future MediaWiki version 1.21.0, reminder comments were added for developers. Andre and Valerie also held the first IRC Office Hour on Bugzilla and Bug management for those interested in discussing problems and improvements with Wikimedia's bug management. In Bugzilla's internal product and component taxonomy, several Mobile application products were merged into a single "Wikipedia App" product and two Search components were merged, to simplify finding information for developers and reporters. Also, the bug management task list received a major cleanup, making it clearer what is being worked on and what you can help with.<section end="2013-03-monthly"/>

2013-04-09
<section begin="2013-04-09"/>As part of the QA Weekly Goals, a bugday took place which resulted in about 90 reports Skin and page rendering bug reports being looked at and commented on.

Andre investigated the globalwatchers setting in Bugzilla and the situation of the wikibugs-l@ account which is used for notifications in other places, such as feeds and IRC. In consequence, wikibugs-l@ was removed from the default CC list of many components for security reasons.

To reduce the amount of bugmail for the QA team, the Bugzilla component "Testing Infrastructure" under "Wikimedia" was renamed to "Continuous Integration" and a new component called "Quality Assurance" was added for Browser testing (Selenium) issues.

Over the weekend, Andre investigated thumbnail cache purging issues brought up in the Village Pumps. He also went through open bug reports with "bugsmash" keyword, retested some of them, and removed the keyword from all of them so the keyword could be used again with its original meaning.<section end="2013-04-09"/>

2013-04-16
<section begin="2013-04-16"/>As part of the QA Weekly Goals, the current bugtriaging week is dedicated to checking old reports which have not seen updates for 18 months, with progress being tracked in the corresponding Etherpad. Andre contacted Bugzilla administrators and (after receiving feedback) reduced the number of admins for coordination and security reasons a bit. He also went through the open reports with a 1.21.0 tarball milestone and updated them. Thanks to Dereckson, Wikimedia Bugzilla's "See Also" field now also supports adding GitHub URLs. As part of Bugzilla maintenance, version entries for the corresponding new MediaWiki 1.20.4/1.19.5 releases were added.<section end="2013-04-16"/>

2013-04-23
<section begin="2013-04-23"/>The "Bugzilla Weekly Report" email sent to wikitech-l now includes a list of open issues with highest priority, plus more fine-grained statistics for the number of open tickets. Wikimedia Bugzilla's "See Also" field now also supports adding RequestTracker URLs (RequestTracker is used by the Wikimedia Operations team). Andre started drafting guidelines on Bugzilla administration and access restrictions, plus updated the recommendations for checking Wikimedia forums (Village Pumps etc.) as one source of feedback on problems. Furthermore, he published an initial version of a Greasemonkey script which provides common one-click stock answers for Village Pumps.<section end="2013-04-23"/>

2013-04-30
<section begin="2013-04-30"/>This week, most previously unprioritized tickets under "Wikimedia Labs" have been set to low priority after consultation with its main developer (Ryan) in order to provide realitistic expectations, and some older high priority tickets were retriaged. Bugzilla's automatic linking to Wikimedia when using MediaWiki syntax now supports Unicode characters thanks to Matma Rex. The Greasemonkey triage scripts for Bugzilla received some smaller updates. Apart from usual triage of reports and tracking down issues brought up on Village Pumps and forums, Andre proposed a bug management talk for the Wikimania 2013 conference and started preparing a series of small blogposts covering handy but not-so-easy-to-discover Bugzilla functionality which might get co-published on bugzillatips.wordpress.com.<section end="2013-04-30"/>

2013-04-monthly
<section begin="2013-04-monthly"/>A bugday at the beginning of April resulted in about 90 reports on about Skin and page rendering being looked at and commented on. On the technical side, Wikimedia Bugzilla's "See Also" field now also supports adding GitHub URLs and adding RequestTracker URLs, and the "Bugzilla Weekly Report" email sent to wikitech-l now includes a list of open issues with highest priority, plus more fine-grained statistics for the number of open tickets. Andre Klapper started drafting guidelines on Bugzilla administration and access restrictions, and updated the recommendations for checking Wikimedia forums (Village Pumps etc.) as sources of feedback on problems. Furthermore, he published an initial version of a Greasemonkey script that provides common one-click stock answers for Village Pumps where software issues might get reported first before being transferred to Bugzilla.<section end="2013-04-monthly"/>

2013-05-07
<section begin="2013-05-07"/>A "Backport_WMF" flag to mark issues that should be backported and deployed to Wikimedia servers was created in Bugzilla as requested by Wikimedia's Release Manager, with a policy being drafted.

On Friday, a MediaWiki Installer bugday took place and a number of Installer bug reports received testing and updates.

Andre had a meeting with Lydia and Abraham of the Wikidata team to discuss their use of Bugzilla, and started regular triage meetings with Michelle of the Mobile development team.

On the technical side, Andre investigated and wrote patches for issues with the Weekly bug summary in Bugzilla and incorrect data in the Weekly Report email on wikitech-l, cleaned up internal Bugzilla groups a bit, and tested and updated the patch for a better Bugzilla frontpage. Ori wrote a patch to puppetize Bugzilla.<section end="2013-05-07"/>

2013-05-14
<section begin="2013-05-14"/>An IRC office hour about Bugzilla and bug management took place (log). Thanks to Ori, a Wikimedia Labs instance to test Bugzilla software changes is now available. Apart from that, the last week mostly consisted of gruntwork: With regard to Bugzilla taxonomy, a number of Bugzilla components (for MW extensions) and a Bugzilla product "Tool Labs tools" were created. Andre tried to debug connectivity issues, reviewed some older ephemeral files on the Bugzilla server that are not in the Bugzilla repository, prioritized a number of previously unprioritized tickets, and had some initial discussions with Wikimedia's Release Manager about improving the bug life cycle workflow (making it clearer when a fix has been deployed).<section end="2013-05-14"/>

2013-05-30
<section begin="2013-05-30"/>Andre attended the Wikimedia Hackathon and talked to numberous people. The proposal for a Bugzilla admin policy received approval from Operations and Security and is waiting for approval from Legal. In Bugzilla's configuration, the ability to hide specific comments has also been made available to Bugzilla users with access to Security issues (before it could only be done by admins), the number of Bugzilla administrators has been decreased in order to improve coordination, and a dedicated emergency account has been created for the Operations team to block users and hide comments in case of spamming. As a side effect, Andre blogged about the meaning of Bugzilla admin rights. Furthermore, Andre documented how to run Bug management IRC office hours, pushed updates to the Greasemonkey scripts for bugtriaging, worked on a patch to display a link in Bugzilla to other bug reports in the same component, and fixed two incorrect queries in the "Weekly Bugzilla Report" email to wikitech-l.<section end="2013-05-30"/>

2013-05-monthly
<section begin="2013-05-monthly"/>A Wikimedia Labs instance to test Bugzilla software changes and a patch to puppetize Bugzilla are now available (thanks to Ori Livneh). This will make updating Bugzilla to newer versions and reapplying Wikimedia's custom patches much easier. A MediaWiki Installer bugday took place in preparation of the MediaWiki 1.21 release, as well as an IRC office hour. Andre Klapper worked on a proposal for a Bugzilla admin policy. In Bugzilla's configuration, the number of Bugzilla administrators has been decreased in order to improve coordination. As a side-effect of his investigation, Andre documented the meaning of Bugzilla admin rights.<section end="2013-05-monthly"/>

2013-06-06
<section begin="2013-06-06"/>In the last four days, apart from gruntwork, Andre reproposed introducing a "PATCH AVAILABLE" status in Bugzilla (as requested by several developers at the Amsterdam Hackathon), set up monthly triage meetings with the Wikimedia Multimedia team, set up a number of meetings for his visit in the Wikimedia Foundation San Francisco office next week, and contacted the legal team again asking for review of the Bugzilla administrator policy draft.<section end="2013-06-06"/>

2013-06-14
<section begin="2013-06-14"/>Andre spent most of the week in the Wikimedia Foundaton office in San Francisco, talking to various teams and people. On the code side of Bugzilla, a new Bugzilla frontpage went live, providing useful links. Furthermore, the misleading term "login" was replaced by "email address" and setting the "Assigned" status already when filing a new bug report got enabled. Andre finalized the Bugzilla Administrator Rights Policy which explains for which specific tasks Bugzilla admin rights are needed. He also started publishing regular "Bugzilla tips and best practices" blogposts with the first one covering autocompletion in Bugzilla. They are linked from the bug management overview page and are expected to be published weekly. As part of Bugzilla housekeeping, open tickets in the dormant "Wiktionary tools" Bugzilla product were retriaged and the product closed for new bug entry.<section end="2013-06-14"/>

2013-06-27
<section begin="2013-06-27"/>Andre experimented with Bugzilla's currently useless "guided" bug reporting form, fixed two issues (1, 2) with the "Weekly Bugzilla Report" email sent to wikitech-l, and reorganized the Security-related components in Bugzilla after a meeting with WMF's security engineer. Apart from spending the last week at the Open Source Bridge conference and giving a talk on bug management together with Mozilla's bugmaster, Andre discussed with Wikimedia's Gerrit maintainers next steps to automatically set a "patch in gerrit" status in Bugzilla and met the Language Engineering team to discuss the UniversalLanguageSelector deployment. He also provided some input and feedback on a potential future blogpost describing the bug fixing process in Wikimedia. Furthermore, as part of a weekly series on "Bugzilla tips", Andre blogged how to change columns in Bugzilla search results.<section end="2013-06-27"/>

2013-06-monthly
<section begin="2013-06-monthly"/>Andre Klapper published the Bugzilla administrator policy and documented for which specific tasks Bugzilla admin rights are actually needed (which might be also helpful for other projects using Bugzilla). He started publishing weekly "Bugzilla tips and best practices" blog posts and reproposed introducing a "PATCH AVAILABLE" status in Bugzilla (as requested by several developers at the Amsterdam Hackathon) whilst work is ongoing to fulfill prerequisites. On the code side of Bugzilla, a new Bugzilla frontpage went live, providing useful links. Furthermore, the misleading term "login" was replaced by "email address", it is now possible to set the "Assigned" status directly when filing a new bug report, and smaller issues with the "Weekly Bugzilla Report" email sent to the wikitech-l mailing list were fixed. In Bugzilla's taxonomy, open tickets in the dormant "Wiktionary tools" product were retriaged and the product closed for new bug entry, and Security-related components in Bugzilla were reorganized after a meeting with the Wikimedia Foundation's security engineer.<section end="2013-06-monthly"/>

2013-07-09
<section begin="2013-07-09"/>Apart from the usual triaging and handling feedback, Andre reorganized the components in the "Parsoid" product as requested by its main developer. Thanks to Daniel Zahn, Bugzilla administrators now regularly receive an email with a database dump of Bugzilla's "audit log" which lists the most recent taxonomy changes in Bugzilla (component or keyword additions, etc.). Andre also updated the bug management task list for the new quarter, continued his weekly blogposts of Bugzilla tips, and announced the next Bug management IRC office hour on Tuesday 16th.<section end="2013-07-09"/>

2013-07-23
<section begin="2013-07-23"/>In the last two weeks, Andre ran a Bug management IRC office hour (full log here), had a meeting with Bugzilla upstream developers to discuss future plans, created a patch to make Bugzilla's guided bug entry form usable for Wikimedia Bugzilla (bug 36762), kept an eye on SUL2 issues, published a Bugzilla admin policy announcement, and introduced a PATCH_IN_GERRIT Bugzilla status as previously discussed here (with related followup tasks still to perform).<section end="2013-07-23"/>

2013-07-29
<section begin="2013-07-29"/>This week, Andre introduced a PATCH_TO_REVIEW status in Bugzilla which is automatically set by the Gerrit Notification Bot in Bugzilla. As a side effect, the "patch-in-gerrit" Bugzilla keyword was removed, the patch status of number of older bug reports was rechecked, and the "Weekly Bugzilla Report" email was updated to incorporate PATCH_TO_REVIEW status. Andre furthermore played with Mozilla's "Needinfo" extension and prepared a patch for using the InlineHistory extension in Bugzilla. After a meeting with the TimedMediaHandler developers, Andre closed all remaining open "OggHandler" bug reports in Bugzilla as it's been superseded by TimedMediaHandler. Also, a dozen of open tickets with the "ops" keyword were retriaged and resolved.<section end="2013-07-29"/>

2013-07-monthly
<section begin="2013-07-monthly"/>A PATCH_TO_REVIEW status was introduced in Bugzilla which is automatically set (by the Gerrit Notification Bot) on bug reports when a commit message in Gerrit mentions a corresponding bug number. Andre prepared a patch for using the InlineHistory extension in Bugzilla and a patch to make Bugzilla's guided bug entry form for new users usable for Wikimedia Bugzilla. Andre also continued his weekly blogposts of Bugzilla tips. Thanks to Daniel Zahn, Bugzilla administrators now regularly receive an email with a database dump of Bugzilla's "audit log" which lists the most recent taxonomy changes in Bugzilla (component or keyword additions, etc.). In Bugzilla's taxonomy, the components in the "Parsoid" product were reorganized as requested by its main developer, and the remaining open "OggHandler" tickets were closed as it has been superseded by TimedMediaHandler.<section end="2013-07-monthly"/>

2013-08-14
<section begin="2013-08-14"/>Andre attended Wikimania 2013 to talk with numerous users and developers about bug management, and gave presentations on Improving MediaWiki quality: How everybody can help with bug report triaging and Transparency and collaboration in Wikimedia engineering. Bugzilla now consequently links to canonical places explaining how to write a good bug report and explaining Bugzilla's UI fields (previous two places contained contradicting information). Preparations for migrating Pywikipedia/Pywikibot bug tracking to Bugzilla have started, and components under the "Analytics" product got restructured as requested by its developers.<section end="2013-08-14"/>

2013-08-20
<section begin="2013-08-20"/>The last days consisted of gruntwork, such as general triage of new incoming Bugzilla tickets, help tracking down urgent issues like bug 52853, prioritizing tickets, pinging on some older highest priority tickets that had not seen updates for a while, improving a number of Bugzilla keyword and component descriptions, creating requested new Extension components, playing with Mozilla's Needinfo Bugzilla extension and pushing an update for the triage helper scripts. Andre also documented testing Bugzilla code changes on the Wikimedia Labs instance.<section end="2013-08-20"/>

2013-08-27
<section begin="2013-08-27"/>Andre cleaned up his Greasemonkey triage helper scripts by providing a setting for each functionality at the beginning of the file, and made sure that they also work for Bugzilla users without editbugs+canconfirm permissions -- a blogpost provides more details. Bugzilla's testing instance on Wikimedia Labs saw several patches deployed for testing, such as showing the history of a bug report inline between the comments, configuring the guided bug entry form for users that are new to bug reporting, and showing a "Show other bugs" link to make finding duplicates easier. Furthermore, Andre updated Bugzilla's technical documentation and created an "Analytics > Tech community metrics" component.<section end="2013-08-27"/>

2013-08-monthly
<section begin="2013-08-monthly"/>Andre gave presentations on Improving MediaWiki quality: How everybody can help with bug report triaging and Transparency and collaboration in Wikimedia engineering at Wikimania 2013. He updated Bugzilla's technical documentation and documented how to test Bugzilla code changes on the Wikimedia Labs instance. Bugzilla now consequently links to canonical places explaining how to write a good bug report and explaining Bugzilla's UI fields. Bugzilla also shows a new "Show other bugs" link next to the "Component" area to make finding similar reports easier. Andre cleaned up his Greasemonkey triage helper scripts by providing a setting for each functionality at the beginning of the file; a blog post provides more details. Bugzilla's testing instance on Wikimedia Labs saw several patches deployed for testing, which after some more testing should end up in the live Bugzilla; changes include: showing the history of a bug report inline between the comments and configuring the guided bug entry form for users that are new to bug reporting.<section end="2013-08-monthly"/>

2013-09-03
<section begin="2013-09-03"/>Apart from usual gruntwork (triaging, commenting, reproducing, nagging, following VillagePumps especially discussing the SecureLogin deployment), Andre mostly continued working on Bugzilla code improvements. He fixed a number of Bugzilla issues and prepared patches for some more. He also visited Wikimedia Germany to have a Q&A session on Bugzilla use.<section end="2013-09-03"/>

2013-09-18
<section begin="2013-09-18"/>Apart from the usual triaging, reproducing and prioritizing of problems and tickets, Andre spent a week in San Francisco and had numerous meetings and discussions about bug management with Wikimedia developers. In Bugzilla's taxonomy, MediaWiki version 1.21.2 was added to Bugzilla and the numerous 1.17.x versions were merged into a single "1.17.x" version. Tickets under the "Tools" product in Bugzilla were retriaged, and a bug report was filed to think about renaming "Tools" to avoid confusion with Tool Labs. As a side effect, MediaWiki-Vagrant is now a product on its own in Bugzilla. Andre also investigated the possibility of restricting access to Bugzilla's Priority field as this was brought up by several developers. In Bugzilla's code, the icons on the Bugzilla frontpage are now centered and some Bugzilla code was resynced with upstream. Reasons for an issue with Bugzilla showing cached CSS files were also investigated.<section end="2013-09-18"/>

2013-09-24
<section begin="2013-09-24"/>The week mostly has been gruntwork (triaging, updating Greasemonkey scripts, pinging on some older tickets, replying on VillagePumps). Andre started to think about Bugzilla taxonomy improvements and joined the initial bug triage of Multimedia tickets. Daniel Zahn created a "clean" Labs instance of Wikimedia Bugzilla to easier compare behavior to other testing instances on Labs. Legoktm provided a patch to support Sourceforge URLs in Bugzilla's "See Also" field as part of moving pywikipedia bug reports from SourceForge to Bugzilla.<section end="2013-09-24"/>

2013-09-monthly
<section begin="2013-09-monthly"/>This month, beside our usual ongoing work and numerous small fixes to Bugzilla's code and changes to taxonomy, Legoktm provided a patch to support Sourceforge URLs in Bugzilla's "See Also" field, as part of moving pywikipedia bug reports from SourceForge to Bugzilla. Andre Klapper added an option to display metadata changes to a bug report (which are available via the "History" link in a Bugzilla ticket) inline, between the comments. It is now possible to distinguish the products 'MediaWiki' and 'MediaWiki extensions' in Bugzilla's search results. Furthermore, work on creating a guided bug entry form for newcomers continued.<section end="2013-09-monthly"/>

2013-10-01
<section begin="2013-10-01"/>Bugzilla received an option to display metadata changes of a bug report (which are available via the "History" link in a Bugzilla ticket) inline, between the comments. It is now possible to distinguish the products 'MediaWiki' and 'MediaWiki extensions' in Bugzilla's search results. Furthermore, work on creating a guided bug entry form for newcomers continued. Andre pinged on numerous open tickets in PATCH_TO_REVIEW status where the corresponding patch has been merged, went through open tickets with target milestone set to 1.22.0 and pinged/updated their statuses (in reply to tarball release plans), reset tickets from ASSIGNED to NEW status when the assignee was set to the default nobody@ assignee, and started investigating potential issues with our custom CSS theme for Bugzilla.<section end="2013-10-01"/>

2013-10-15
<section begin="2013-10-15"/>The recently introduced option to display metadata changes of a bug report inline has been enabled by default for all logged-in users. Legoktm finished mass-importing all remaining Pywikibot tickets from Sourceforge to Bugzilla. Andre investigated Wikimedia Bugzilla's custom CSS changes for Bugzilla and created numerous cleanup patches (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) to simplify maintenance. Work also continued on bringing the guided bug entry form into shape by incorporating feedback from the design team in an updated patch which can also be tested on Labs. Furthermore, Andre attended Mozilla Summit 2013 and discussed Bugzilla related topics with other attendees (see blog entry).<section end="2013-10-15"/>