In the last few weeks of working at Symbian, I have become a heavy user of Bugzilla. Bugzilla is the bug tracker that is used to track bugs in the Symbian platform; it is also used to track web site bugs and improvements.
You may wonder why I am using Bugzilla so much. It started, as I needed to monitor what problems the contributor community has with the web-site. And sometimes it was necessary to nudge Foundation staff along, when bugs that were important to my community got stuck. I quickly found myself in a situation where I was monitoring up to 40 bugs at a time. We also started using Bugzilla to manage administrative change requests such as changes in package owners, awarding committer rights, etc.
The Bugzilla Web Interface
The web interface of Bugzilla is OK, but it does have a number of weaknesses such as:
- The UI does not scale well when handling a large number of bugs
- There is no easy way to find out when a bug has changed
- One gets an awful lot of e-mail notifications
- It does not handle conflicts very well
In a nutshell Bugzilla works, but the usability could be much better. As a consequence, I spent much more time than I expected dealing with Bugzilla. I sometimes lost track of bugs.
Better Tools
Luckily 2 weeks ago, our Bugzilla installation was configured such that it could be used with the open source tool Mylyn, an Eclipse plug-in that works on top of Eclipse based IDEs, such as Carbide. I am also a user of the commercialized stand-alone version of Mylyn, called Tasktop Pro, which enables me to use Mylyn outside the IDE, and adds extra features such as mail and calendar integration. Mylyn is now a regular part of my work environment, and I published instructions on how to install and configure on our Wiki [link].
My Life Transformed
Mylyn has transformed my experience with Bugzilla. I can easily stay on top of bugs through 6 bug queries that I have defined. These are neatly displayed in a task list that shows dependencies amongst bugs. As a result I frequently use dependencies in Bugzilla now: something I have not used before. The best thing about the task list is that changes to bugs are indicated through appropriate icons. I also like the quick search feature and integrated support to attach screenshots.
One thing that is noteworthy is that queries and bugs are cached on my PC: this means I can work on public transport, without an internet connection. I can synchronize with Bugzilla repositories as needed. What is nice is that write conflicts to Bugzilla are resolved seamlessly: the web interface does not do this well.
I also like the rich Eclipse editor for tasks. It makes it easier to navigate through a bug, and has nice features such as hyperlinks and Wiki formatting, e.g. if I type ”Bug 1234” anywhere, a hyperlink is created which I can follow by just clicking on it.
Mylyn also provides other functionality to increases productivity. To be honest, I have not explored these much, but you may want to have a look at the MyLyn get started page. Another good source of information is Mik Kersten’s blog. Mik leads the Mylyn project and is the CEO of Tasktop.
Enough swarming: I would just like to encourage you to give it a go!
P.S.: I have written this blog entry with ScribeFire, another lovely open source tool
7 Comments
Good stuff. A couple of questions (as always)
1) Is Symbian going to sponsor someone to write a good Hg interface to Mylyn so the full Foundation submission process will be supported?
2) Is there a solid process now for how defects raised on the OS in the Symbian Bugzilla system become defects in the member companies defect trackers (and vice versa)?
Sounds cool, unfortunately Mylyn doesn’t appear to work with customized bugzilla, like the Carbide.c++ team uses.
@David: if enough people in the Symbian community are using Mylyn, Hg integration is definitely worth investigating. As it stands, Bugzilla support on its own provides clear benefits.
On processes to transfer defects: the commercial version of Mylyn has a feature called “Sent to another repository” which enables copying bugs between different repositories. However I could not find it in the open source version.
@Tim: Do you mean the Bugzilla the Carbide.c++ team uses internally? Maybe worth working with the Mylyn team.
In the last few days I was doing a similar evaluation of Tasktop over bugzilla.
A few other aspects also interest me
* Eclipse plug in: Whatever Tasktop standalone app does can be done through an eclipse plugin. So developers can use one IDE to develop code and do other things
* Context capture : Tasktop records the files you access / sites you browse during an active task and maintains it. If ever you reactivate the task again – you see all the history neatly recorded. Especially useful when you switch contexts/multitask.
Lack of Thunderbird support is a big miss though !
I found (thanks to TaskTop) that if a bugzilla has customized fields it will work if it’s Bugzilla version 3.0.2 or greater. Austin team should be upgrading version soon.
I found it pretty cool I could just create a web-link to our bugzilla, then I could create tasks from individual bugs and it would keep the links for easy reference.
I’ve only been using Mylyn/TaskTop for a few days, and it’s hard to remember not to go back to my web browser when it’s all in front of me in the IDE – it will take a while to retrain by brain.
@Tim Good to hear that were able to find out that you need a Bugzilla version more recent than 3.0.2 for the custom fields to work. When the user does a “Validate Settings” on an earlier version, we could consider adding a warning that custom fields won’t work if we notice an incompatible Bugzilla version. If that would have helped you identify the problem earlier, please consider filing a bug. And yes, can take a bit of time to transition your work practice out of the browser. Setting up your queries according to best practices makes that go quicker. Once you do that, you’ll be able to turn off or filter your Bugzilla email notifications.
@Nithya Yes we’ve had a ton of requests for Thunderbird integration, which is causing it to move up in Tasktop’s product backlog.
@Mik: Thanks for pointing out the best practices. I didn’t realize one could switch off the Bugzilla e-mail notifications. They are indeed extremely annoying. The suggestions for the queries are also excellent: I used to have the same bug in several queries. The article showed me how to construct better queries.
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