Standard8’s Blog

Thunderbird Bugs: Clearing up the picture

Over the last 3 or 4 months, the Thunderbird QA team have been working hard on going through Thunderbird’s unconfirmed bugs and closing or confirming as appropriate.

Since March, 10 Bug days have been held, and somewhere over 500 bugs have been removed from the unconfirmed list. Today, the unconfirmed count (in the Thunderbird product) has just dropped below 3000. The effect is best seen on this chart.

I would like to say a big thank you to all those how have been involved in this effort, especially to Wayne and Gary who have driven the bug days and helped and encouraged new members of the bug traige team.

What is especially good about this effort, is that the aim hasn’t just been to close bugs randomly, but to confirm/close them intelligently - e.g. if there’s simply not enough information to reproduce and the reporter can’t be contacted, then unfortunately we’re not going to be able to do much about the bug, or alternately if we can reproduce and its not a duplicate, then it needs confirming.

This effort is helping to provide a better picture; reducing the amount of bugs in components is a good thing, making it clearer where the problems really lie. As a result, I (and others) have picked up some bugs that I’ve seen as unconfirmed (or commented on) and fixed them because they are a simple fix, but the bug has just been “hiding”, so this effort is really benefiting Thunderbird.

So well done to all those involved with our bug triage, keep up the good work.