![]() She’s just remodeling and modernizing what’s already there. The foundation is solid, Humphries said, so after her review, she decided against doing a teardown and re-build. And they built their own multivalue flags, used mostly for fine-grained release management tracking within Mozilla. These flags can be attached to a product or a component. Tracking flags were added over five years ago. “What you really want to know,” said Humphries, “is ‘which commit broke it?’” Structureīugzilla was built-in TK/TCL, then ported over to PERL with Apache ModPerl and MySQL as a backend. She asked fundamental questions like, are keywords the right way to indicate a bug? Would it be better to have a multistate flag?īecause a question about a bug being a regression is non-binary, there’s several questions to be answered about how a bug is flagged, she said. Humphries also revisited what it means to track a bug throughout the entire system. ![]() Over time there’s so much optional metadata that’s been added that “I started going through the metadata and asking ‘is this necessary?’,” she said. Humphries started by taking a step back and reviewing the system as a whole, starting with metadata. Then there was the issue of exploding metadata. As Luis Villa noted, “Votes end up having no bearing on actual bug validity, importance, or severity.” It turns out, Humphries said, that voting is a rotten way to prioritize features. These were built on an ad-hoc basis and Humphries inherited an unwieldy system desperately in need of cohesion and modernization.Īnother issue was the way bugs were prioritized. Twenty years ago, SaaS wasn’t a thing, so over the years, the system was adopted by teams across the company, from HR to legal and even for mascot requests for Foxy, all of whom asked for customizations to fit their specific use cases. And with over 1.5 million bugs in the system, scaling was no longer an option.īecause Bugzilla had a database and access control list, it could be used to track both bugs and tasks. What Humphries inherited when she arrived almost four years ago was a system that had been adapted and customized in ways that worked for the immediate needs of various groups throughout Mozilla, but made it impossible to scale. Modernizing Bugzillaīut before the BugBug could be created, Bugzilla itself needed some fundamental changes. The challenge, she said, is how to use machine learning wisely. It’s not like they could dump in data from the 1.5 million bugs and simply train off of that. Not all people who submit bugs are engineers, so there’s a danger in training BugBug on bugs that were written by people who come from different backgrounds, said Humphries. “People just weren’t picking up bugs that were general,” said Humphries.Ĭastelluccio wrote in the “ Teaching machines to triage Firefox bugs” post, that “To help get bugs in front of the right Firefox engineers quickly, we developed BugBug, a machine learning tool that automatically assigns a product and component for each new untriaged bug.” ![]() Sixty percent of the bugs are tagged in a general component by users submitting the bugs, but bugs were only being picked up to be worked on from a specific component. feature requests, or meta bugs, or refactorings, and so on.”īugzilla uses a classification system for bugs, which tag every bug. ![]() “This makes it hard to know which bugs are bugs and which bugs are not bugs but e.g. “Bugs are used to track anything, from ‘Create an LDAP account for contributor X’ to ‘Printing page Y doesn’t work,’” He wrote. Bugzilla is a 20-year old bug tracking system where engineers and Firefox users can submit bugs they find.īugBug, Mozilla’s new ML platform, automatically assesses each new bug and automatically assigns it to the correct product and component. This is just the first phase of this work.īugzilla is a noisy data source, wrote Marco Castelluccio on his blog at GitHub titled “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” Adding machine learning (ML) to Bugzilla is solving several problems, said Emma Humphries, Bugmaster at Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox open source web browser.
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