{"id":70,"date":"2012-06-14T17:32:02","date_gmt":"2012-06-14T17:32:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nfroyd\/?p=70"},"modified":"2012-06-14T17:32:02","modified_gmt":"2012-06-14T17:32:02","slug":"lessons-learned-while-filing-bugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nfroyd\/2012\/06\/14\/lessons-learned-while-filing-bugs\/","title":{"rendered":"lessons learned while filing bugs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When I tell people that I and my entire team at Mozilla work remote, they often ask, &#8220;How do you keep track of everything people are doing?&#8221;\u00a0 I tell them about <a href=\"http:\/\/bugzilla.mozilla.org\/\">Bugzilla<\/a> and anything that needs fixed goes into it as a bug; bugs aren&#8217;t just for software problems, but hardware requests, account requests, office maintenance, the list goes on.\u00a0 A bug is anything that prevents you from getting your work done.<\/p>\n<p>Despite extolling the virtues of filing things, large and small, in Bugzilla, I (re?)learned two lessons about filing bugs this week:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Even if you think something is totally obvious, file a bug<\/strong>.\u00a0 I needed to modify the Android mozconfigs this week because <a href=\"https:\/\/bugzilla.mozilla.org\/show_bug.cgi?id=763991\">they weren&#8217;t turning on telemetry support<\/a>, like our desktop mozconfigs.\u00a0 In the process, I became disgusted with how much copy-and-paste there is between our mozconfigs and thought, &#8220;Surely, there is a bug out there already on this goop.&#8221;\u00a0 I even asked one of my colleagues, <a href=\"http:\/\/glandium.org\/blog\/\">Mike Hommey<\/a>, whether there might be a bug on this already.\u00a0 It turns out there wasn&#8217;t one, but <a href=\"https:\/\/bugzilla.mozilla.org\/show_bug.cgi?id=764010\">there is now<\/a>.\u00a0 I shouldn&#8217;t have even asked Mike; I should have searched Bugzilla a bit and filed something if I couldn&#8217;t find a plausible match\u00a0 Worst-case, somebody would mark my bug as a duplicate and I would be connected with people and\/or possible attempts at fixing the bug already.<\/li>\n<li><strong>If something looks like a bug, file a bug<\/strong>.\u00a0 Back in March, I made it <a href=\"https:\/\/bugzilla.mozilla.org\/show_bug.cgi?id=732053\">harder to get certain kinds of Telemetry histograms wrong<\/a>.\u00a0 In the bug, <a href=\"https:\/\/bugzilla.mozilla.org\/show_bug.cgi?id=732053#c2\">I noted several histograms that were wrong<\/a>, but didn&#8217;t bother to do anything about them.\u00a0 &#8220;Too much work for too little gain,&#8221; I said.\u00a0 Turns out that the networking team has been <a href=\"https:\/\/bugzilla.mozilla.org\/show_bug.cgi?id=763351\">working with bad data on cache Telemetry<\/a> because of one of the aforementioned histograms being wrong.\u00a0 That problem could&#8217;ve been fixed several months ago!\u00a0 My mistake; I should have filed each and every one of those histograms as a bug and let the relevant teams decide what to do about them.\u00a0 Even if you think it&#8217;s harmless, file a bug.\u00a0 Worst case is somebody tells you that it is harmless and you come away enlightened.\u00a0 (And just in case you&#8217;re wondering, yes, there is a bug to <a href=\"https:\/\/bugzilla.mozilla.org\/show_bug.cgi?id=764585\">make those histograms even harder to get wrong<\/a>.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And as always, please remember to follow <a href=\"https:\/\/bugzilla.mozilla.org\/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html\">Bugzilla&#8217;s rules of etiquette<\/a> when filing bugs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I tell people that I and my entire team at Mozilla work remote, they often ask, &#8220;How do you keep track of everything people are doing?&#8221;\u00a0 I tell them about Bugzilla and anything that needs fixed goes into it as a bug; bugs aren&#8217;t just for software problems, but hardware requests, account requests, office [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":320,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nfroyd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nfroyd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nfroyd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nfroyd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/320"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nfroyd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nfroyd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nfroyd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nfroyd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nfroyd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}