Thunderbird:Bugdays

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Welcome to the Thunderbird Bug Day wiki!

Join us to improve the bug reports in Thunderbird's bug database.

Who

You

Anyone (meaning you) can participate and be a valuable contributor - no coding and no experience required. The information below will help you get started. Plus, we have experienced people are available to assist you.

Why

Before bugs can be resolved (fixed or closed) they often need cleaning and improvement because:

• some bug reports do not have steps to reproduce or are incomplete, sometimes because the reporter does not fully understand the problem
• some issues may no longer exist
• some issues are not caused by bugs in Thunderbird, so questions must be asked of users or testing performed to determine what may have caused them (something other than Thunderbird)

Also, rub elbows with other contributors as you take a break from your boring everyday routine while helpin to drive down the red (UNCONFIRMED) line in this chart. another chart view

Schedule

Upcoming bugdays are Monday April 8 (all day for EU and Americas timezones) and Saturday April 13 (EU and Americas timezones until 4pm EDT).

If you cannot help on those dates, we invite you to work on any bug, any day or time See Where about getting help.

Where

Help is available in #tb-qa IRC chat channel [1]. To understand the channel, type /topic in the channel.

To get someone's attention 1) find a user's nick (nickname/username) with a star or another special indicator and 2) do "ping <nick>"

Ways to connect to IRC include:

• Web service (free mibbit)
  1. open Mibbit #tb-qa
  2. pick a nickname
  3. click Go
• Thunderbird chat
  1. setup a chat account in Thunderbird
  2. Use server name irc.mozilla.org
  3. Join the channel #tb-qa at Tools > Join Chat
• Client application
  1. Get one of the following: Windows clients, MacOS clients, Linux clients
  2. Connect to server - /server irc.mozilla.org.
  3. Join the channel - /join #tb-qa

[1] General information about IRC: about mozilla IRC, irchelp.

How

If at any point you need help or advice, get on IRC and post a note in the #tb-qa IRC channel and/or ping someone.

1. Get an account - easily created at bugzilla account. Please include your IRC nickname in your user/real name, prefaced by a colon, as in "Joe Superman :nickname".
2. Protect - Backup your data. Use a test profile especially if bugs might cause dataloss (see next two points).
3. Make a test environment (optional) - You can create and use a profile just for testing.
4. Get a build - Testing is best done with "Daily" builds because it has the newest code. Daily is also referred to as "Nightly" or "Trunk", which is where Thunderbird is developed. You can also download a localized build of Daily (or any other version) so you can test if everything works and displays as designed in your language. Trunk/Daily also has the greatest risk of problems, so if you don't want to use Daily then please use Beta. (Worst case, use the last released version.)

(Nightly builds April 6-7 may not completely work.)

1. Pick bugs - current bugday "Focus" suggests which bugs to work on.
2. Work the bugs - which means test the problem, in the bug report make comments and suggest or make changes to the bug fields, and help the user. For UNCONFIRMED bugs, mark as "confirmed" if you are able to reproduce and the steps to reproduce are well documented and easily followed, and the problem exists in trunk build. If you are not running trunk but can replicate with current release, please comment with your findings, but do not set to confirmed.
   • Clarify the bug report without distorting or changing the original problem. For example if you found a related or new issue not described in the bug being tested, then you should make a new bug for that issue.
   • Change the bug's one line summary at the top of the bug page to be more accurate and complete, but also remove words to make summary less chatty - a summary should not read like a book, nor a syntactically correct sentence - shortness is good.
   • For a bug that tests as no longer existing, close bug report as resolution WORKSFORME, INVALID, or INCOMPLETE as is appropriate.
   • Ask bug reporter or someone else to gain information that will help you reproduce the issue. Set the "Need more information from" field.
   • Set a more appropriate Thunderbird component or MailNews component for the problem being described.
   • Cite what version(s) of Thunderbird you have used in your testing.
3. Give feedback about your bugday experience (see feedback heading below)

If you are new to bugzilla - some quick tips:

• Searching in bugzilla can be tricky. Quicksearch tricks and Advanced Search may help you produce more accurate and smaller search results.
• If you cannot change a bug field, please add a bug comment detailing what should be changed and why, and then inform someone in the IRC channel.
• See Bug triage about how to get upgraded privileges so you can change bug fields.

More helpful information at:

• Thunderbird Bug triage - expert tips, extensions, reference documents
• Bug Writing Guidelines describes how to write an effective bug report that leads to bug fixes.
• Writing a good bug report.

Give us feedback

Please tell us #tb-qa about your triage experience. We really appreciate your help today and your feedback is very valuable.

Thanks!

Thanks so much for your help. Your efforts help us to improve Thunderbird. We could never do this without you.