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Submitting A Bug Report

What Are Bug Reports

In Beaversource, a bug report is submitted through the use of a 'Ticket'. Bugs reported through tickets are a way to organizing the errors found within a project. There can be many types of errors in a project and writing a bug report is a precise operation. If the error is in implementation, the role of a bug report is to enable the programmer to see the program failing in front of them. In most cases you can't show an error in person, so you must give them careful and detailed instructions on how to make it fail. If they can make it fail, they will try to gather extra information until they know the cause. If they cannot make it fail, they will have to ask you to gather that information for them. Programmers like precision. The aim of the bug report is to enable them to reproduce the problem in the most efficient and clear way.

Projects In Beaversource

Follow this link to find out how to join or create a project: Creating and Joining A Project

To create a ticket to submit your bug report, head to your project's web page, you will notice that you have access to new tabs: Roadmap and Tickets.

The Roadmap

The 'Roadmap' provides a view on the ticket system that helps planning and managing the future development of a project. The 'Roadmap' is a list of future milestones. Each milestone contains a description (using WikiFormatting) describing main objectives and other goals. In addition, the tickets targeted for a milestone are aggregated, and the ratio between active and resolved tickets is displayed as a milestone progress bar.

Tickets

The Tickets tab in Beaversource reports the active tickets in your project. 'Active' tickets are bugs or issues within the project that have not been resolved. The report shows the Ticket #, Component, Version, Milestone, Type, Owner and Date of creation. For more information see TracReports.

As you can see from this list of tickets, only two tickets are bugs or bug reports.

Writing A Bug Report

Here are several concepts to think about before writing a bug report.

• Be precise
• Be clear - explain it so others can reproduce the bug
• No bug is too trivial to report - small bugs may hide big bugs
• Clearly separate fact from speculation

1. To write a ticket, go to your project's website (usually: http://beaversource.oregonstate.edu/projects/[project name]) and click the Tickets tab.

2. Next, click Create new ticket.

A ticket contains the following information attributes. You will need to know the components that make up your project so you can address the correct errors when explaining your bug report.

• Reporter - The author of the ticket.
• Summary - A brief description summarizing the problem or issue.
• Description - The body of the ticket. A good description should be specific, descriptive and to the point.
• Type - The nature of the ticket (for example, defect or enhancement request)
• Component - The project module or subsystem this ticket concerns.
• Version - Version of the project that this ticket pertains to.
• Keywords - Keywords that a ticket is marked with. Useful for searching and report generation.
• Priority - The importance of this issue, ranging from trivial to blocker.
• Milestone - When this issue should be resolved at the latest.
• Assigned to/Owner - Principal person responsible for handling the issue.
• Cc - A list of other associated people. Note that this does not imply responsibility or any other policy.

3. Fill out the new ticket with as much detail as possible. First, make sure you select Defect from the 'type' dropdown menu. Next, explain the issue as precisely and coherently as possible so the error can be understood and reproduced. Once the Bug Report is complete, Click Submit ticket.

Once the bug report is submitted you will get an email notification.

You will also get email notifications when someone edits your bug report. In this case, several components were not assigned. As you can see, the users 'bettse' and 'jensenca' corrected the summary, milestone, component and owner.