Categories
Web

Bugzilla Thoughts

Bug reporting is tricky. Bugs are problems in software where the software doesn’t work as it should. “It doesn’t work.” doesn’t get you anywhere with the developer of the software in question, so the key is to report exactly what happend and what should happen very clearly. Steven Frank (of Panic, Inc. software-makers) has made a list explaining what you should and shouldn’t do when reporting bugs. One of the things Frank specifically mentions as being good ways to convey bug reports are images and video.

A lot of open source projects use Bugzilla (of Mozilla origin) to track bugs and make discussion of those bugs possible. Shouldn’t Bugzilla make it possible (and easy!) to include images and video in bug reports?

If Buzzfeed can do it

2 replies on “Bugzilla Thoughts”

Bugzilla allows attachments and links URLs that you include in comments so you can click on them. So you could either upload the image or movie as an attachment or host it somewhere and link to it. Either way gets it on the bug report.

Good to hear it isn’t too hard.

I must say, Bugzilla doesn’t exactly invite images & video at the moment. Before reading Frank’s article, I never thought of adding an image or video footage to a bugreport there. If you want to leverage more of the user base for bugreporting that may be something to look at. Competely depends what you need in your development of course. (But as Bugzilla is used for so many other projects, it still may be handy to design/think towards that, even if Mozilla itself isn’t going to be using/needing it.

Comments are closed.