Bugzilla is a
WebThe World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
-based general-purpose bugtracker and
testing toolTest automation is the use of software to control the execution of tests, the comparison of actual outcomes to predicted outcomes, the setting up of test preconditions, and other test control and test reporting functions...
originally developed and used by the
MozillaMozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the Mozilla.org project and the Mozilla Foundation, their defunct commercial predecessor Netscape Communications Corporation, and their related application software....
project, and licensed under the
Mozilla Public LicenseThe Mozilla Public License is a free and open source software license. Version 1.0 was developed by Mitchell Baker when she worked as a lawyer at Netscape Communications Corporation and version 1.1 at the Mozilla Foundation...
.
Released as open source software by Netscape Communications in 1998, it has been adopted by a variety of organizations for use as a
bug tracking systemA bug tracking system is a software application that is designed to help quality assurance and programmers keep track of reported software bugs in their work. It may be regarded as a type of issue tracking system....
for both
free and open source softwareFree and open-source software or free/libre/open-source software is software that is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code...
and
proprietaryProprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...
projects and products.
History
Bugzilla was originally written by Terry Weissman in 1998 for the nascent Mozilla.org project, as an
open sourceThe term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
application to replace the in-house system then in use at Netscape Communications for tracking defects in the
Netscape CommunicatorNetscape Communicator was an Internet suite produced by Netscape Communications Corporation. Initially released in June 1997, Netscape Communicator 4.0 was the successor to Netscape Navigator 3.x and included more groupware features intended to appeal to enterprises.- Editions :Netscape...
suite. Originally written in
TclTcl is a scripting language created by John Ousterhout. Originally "born out of frustration", according to the author, with programmers devising their own languages intended to be embedded into applications, Tcl gained acceptance on its own...
, Terry decided to port Bugzilla to
PerlPerl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
before its release as part of Netscape's early open source code drops, with the hopes that more people would be able to contribute to it as Perl seemed to be a more popular language at the time.
Bugzilla 2.0 was the result of that port to Perl, and the first version released to the public via anonymous
CVSThe Concurrent Versions System , also known as the Concurrent Versioning System, is a client-server free software revision control system in the field of software development. Version control system software keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, and allows several developers ...
. In April 2000, Weissman handed off control of the Bugzilla project to Tara Hernandez. Under Tara's leadership, some of the regular contributors were coerced into taking more responsibility, and Bugzilla development became more community-driven. In July 2001, facing distraction from her other responsibilities in Netscape, Tara handed off control to
Dave MillerDave Miller is an American software developer best known as the project leader and one of the main original developers of the Bugzilla bug tracking tool developed at Mozilla.Org. He assumed the role of Bugzilla's maintainer after the previous maintainer, Tara Hernandez, stepped down. His Bugzilla...
, who was still in charge .
Bugzilla 3.0 was released on May 10, 2007 and brought refreshed
UIThe user interface, in the industrial design field of human–machine interaction, is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the...
,
XML-RPCXML-RPC is a remote procedure call protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism. "XML-RPC" also refers generically to the use of XML for remote procedure call, independently of the specific protocol...
interface, custom fields and resolutions,
mod perlmod_perl is an optional module for the Apache HTTP server. It embeds a Perl interpreter into the Apache server, so that dynamic content produced by Perl scripts can be served in response to incoming requests, without the significant overhead of re-launching the Perl interpreter for each request...
support, shared saved searches, improved
UTF-8UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
support and others.
Bugzilla 4.0 was released on February 15, 2011.
Requirements
Bugzilla's
system requirementsTo be used efficiently, all computer software needs certain hardware components or other software resources to be present on a computer. These pre-requisites are known as system requirements and are often used as a guideline as opposed to an absolute rule. Most software defines two sets of system...
include:
- A compatible database management system
A database management system is a software package with computer programs that control the creation, maintenance, and use of a database. It allows organizations to conveniently develop databases for various applications by database administrators and other specialists. A database is an integrated...
- A suitable release of Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
5
- An assortment of Perl modules
- A compatible web server
Web server can refer to either the hardware or the software that helps to deliver content that can be accessed through the Internet....
- A suitable mail transfer agent
Within Internet message handling services , a message transfer agent or mail transfer agent or mail relay is software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using a client–server application architecture...
, or any SMTP server
Currently supported database systems are
MySQLMySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
,
PostgreSQLPostgreSQL, often simply Postgres, is an object-relational database management system available for many platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MS Windows and Mac OS X. It is released under the PostgreSQL License, which is an MIT-style license, and is thus free and open source software...
, and
OracleThe Oracle Database is an object-relational database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation....
. Bugzilla is usually installed on
LinuxLinux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
and runs using the
Apache HTTP ServerThe Apache HTTP Server, commonly referred to as Apache , is web server software notable for playing a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web. In 2009 it became the first web server software to surpass the 100 million website milestone...
, but Microsoft Internet Information Services or any web server that supports
CGIThe Common Gateway Interface is a standard method for web servers software to delegate the generation of web pages to executable files...
can be used. Bugzilla's installation process is command line driven and runs through a series of stages where system requirements and software capabilities are checked.
Design
While the potential exists in the code to turn Bugzilla into a technical support ticket system, task management tool, or project management tool, Bugzilla's developers have chosen to focus on the task of designing a system to track software defects. Mandated design requirements include:
- The ability to run on freely available, open source tools. While Bugzilla development includes work to support commercial databases, tools, and operating systems, this is not intended to come at the expense of open source ones.
- The maintenance of speed and efficiency at all costs. One of Bugzilla's major attractions to developers is its lightweight implementation and speed, so calls into the database are minimized whenever possible, data fetching is kept as light as possible, and generation of heavy HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
is avoided.
- Tickets. For instance, Mozilla.org and the MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...
project use it to track feature requests as well. Bugs can be submitted by anybody, and will be assigned to a particular developer. Various status updates for each bug are allowed, together with user notes and bug examples. In practice, most Bugzilla projects allowing the public to file bugs—such as the Bugzilla bug database for Bugzilla itself—assign all bugs to a gatekeeper, whose job it is to assign responsibility and priority level.
By design, Bugzilla is programmed to return the string "zarro boogs found" instead of "0 bugs found" when a search for bugs returns no results. "Zarro Boogs" is a facetious meta-statement about the nature of software
debuggingA software bug is the common term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program or system that produces an incorrect or unexpected result, or causes it to behave in unintended ways. Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made by people in either a program's...
.
Bug tracking systemA bug tracking system is a software application that is designed to help quality assurance and programmers keep track of reported software bugs in their work. It may be regarded as a type of issue tracking system....
s like Bugzilla readily describe how many
known bugs are outstanding. The response "zarro boogs", is intended as a buggy statement itself (a misspelling of "zero bugs"), implying that even when no bugs have been identified, software is still likely to contain bugs that haven't yet been identified.
See also
- Comparison of issue tracking systems
This article is a comparison of issue tracking systems which are notable, including bug tracking systems, help desk and service desk issue tracking systems, and asset management systems...