Bugtracking

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Revision as of 16:36, 13 June 2004 by Gero (Talk | contribs)

Introduction

I don't care what anybody says. I don't care for fancy talks by great marketing people. Once you've programmed you know that bugs are an unfortunate part of everyday life including programs. That said one point has to be made. TUTOS usually contains very few bugs and the ones that do exist are often easily found and corrected. This has for a big part to do with the open source nature of the project since many skilled reviewers make finding and fixing bugs a lot easier than with a closed source program.

When you are ready to install your product you are pretty confident that it is actually pretty perfect all and by itself. But then the first customer calls and he has found a bug, like it or not. Thankfully TUTOS has the ability to take note of bugs, dispatch them to someone to handle and off course been able to book time spent on finding and fixing bugs. There is an email system informing you of what's going on in this section and it does keep track of the complete bugreport history. Curious? Well let's start then.


Create

The 'bug create' option (actually you don't create a bug but a bugreport) can be reached in many ways. One such method is via the project details screen we saw earlier. There you will see a 'bug create' option in the upper left part of the menu. Clicking on this link will bring you to a screen similar to the one you see in the next picture.

The bugreport creation screen

As you can see there is a lot of information already filled in. Every bugreport has its own unique identification number (how this number is generated is something the TUTOS administrator can set up). In this screen you can enter a short description of the problem. Make sure this is short and informative to all. Furthermore you can set the class of the bug. Is it a light, heavy, dangerous bug or merely a suggestion (feature request). The biggest part of the screen is reserved to enter as much information as possible. For now we will say that we have a light bug because we are out of staples and this has negative impact on the documentation project. We enter the information into the screen and click on the Enter button.

The filled in bug creation screen

After clicking on the Enter button we are presented with the following screen. As you can see, TUTOS informs us that it is incapable of sending an email to user Linux B Torvalds about the entered bugreport. Although this is the first time we see an error message in the TUTOS system please take note of it. As you work more with the system you will see them more often when you do something the wrong way.

The result

As you can see all the information is in place and you can even book time spent on this bug so far. So let's book 1 hour and continue by modifying this bug in the next section.


Modify

Now that we have a bugreport it so happens that we have this intern we can sent out to get some staples. So we add this information to the bugreport. First we click on the 'Modify' link in the upper left part of the menu and add the information as can be seen in the next picture.

The bugreport screen

As you can see I have reassigned this bugreport to out intern (who happens to be a Bill Gates) and made a remark of it in the bugreport. It is also possible at this stage to enter the state of this bugreport. There are several options to choose from:

   * OPEN: The bugreport is in an open state. Someone has to start working on it.
   * IN PROGRESS: Someone has started working on it.
   * SOLVED: The bug has been solved but is not yet archived.
   * CLOSED: No work will be done on this bug and it is archived for future reference 

We leave the state as it is for now. When we click on the 'Enter' button we are presented with the new bugreport.

The changed bugreport screen

Don't worry about the order in which these entries are displayed. My guess is that will change soon.

Display

Delete

Overview

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