Bugzilla

About the Tutorial

Bugzilla is an open-source tool used for issues and bugs tracking system. It is widely used as
a bug-reporting tool for all types of testing functions. This tutorial introduces the readers to
the basic features and usage of Bugzilla. This tutorial will guide the readers on how to utilize
this tool in reporting and maintaining the bug status.

Audience
This tutorial has been prepared for beginners to help them understand how to use the Bugzilla
tool. This tutorial will give you enough understanding of the various components of Bugzilla
with suitable examples.

Prerequisites
As a reader of this tutorial, you should have a basic understanding of bug lifecycle and contents
to provide in a bug.

Copyright & Disclaimer

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We strive to update the contents of our website and tutorials as timely and as precisely as
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provides no guarantee regarding the accuracy, timeliness or completeness of our website or
its contents including this tutorial. If you discover any errors on our website or in this tutorial,
please notify us at [email protected]

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Table of Contents
About the Tutorial ......................................................................................................................................... 1

Audience ....................................................................................................................................................... 1

Prerequisites ................................................................................................................................................. 1

Copyright & Disclaimer .................................................................................................................................. 1

Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................................... 2

1. BUGZILLA – OVERVIEW ............................................................................................................. 4

2. BUGZILLA – INSTALLATION PREREQUISITES .............................................................................. 6

3. BUGZILLA ─ INSTALLATION........................................................................................................ 5

4. BUGZILLA – SAMPLE WEB APPLICATION ................................................................................. 10

5. BUGZILLA – NEW ACCOUNT CREATION................................................................................... 11

6. BUGZILLA – LOGIN .................................................................................................................. 14

7. BUGZILLA – LOGGING A NEW BUG.......................................................................................... 16

8. BUGZILLA – CLONE A BUG....................................................................................................... 21

9. BUGZILLA – UNDERSTANDING A BUG ..................................................................................... 24

10. BUGZILLA – EDITING A BUG .................................................................................................... 27

11. BUGZILLA – REPORTS .............................................................................................................. 30

12. BUGZILLA – GRAPHICAL REPORTS ........................................................................................... 32

13. BUGZILLA – TABULAR REPORTS............................................................................................... 36

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14. BUGZILLA – DUPLICATE ........................................................................................................... 39

Generate Duplicate Reports ........................................................................................................................ 39

Changing the Parameters ............................................................................................................................ 41

15. BUGZILLA – BROWSE FUNCTION ............................................................................................. 43

16. BUGZILLA – SIMPLE SEARCH ................................................................................................... 46

17. BUGZILLA – QUICK SEARCH ..................................................................................................... 49

18. BUGZILLA – ADVANCE SEARCH................................................................................................ 51

19. BUGZILLA – CUSTOM SEARCH ................................................................................................. 54

20. BUGZILLA – BUG LISTS ............................................................................................................ 58

21. BUGZILLA – PREFERENCES ...................................................................................................... 68

22. BUGZILLA – GENERAL PREFERENCES ....................................................................................... 70

23. BUGZILLA – EMAIL PREFERENCES ........................................................................................... 73

Global and Specific Options ......................................................................................................................... 73

User Watching Feature ................................................................................................................................ 74

Ignore Bugs Feature..................................................................................................................................... 75

24. BUGZILLA – SAVED SEARCHES ................................................................................................. 76

25. BUGZILLA – ACCOUNT INFORMATION .................................................................................... 80

26. BUGZILLA – PERMISSIONS ....................................................................................................... 82

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 1. Bugzilla – Overview Bugzilla

Bugzilla is an open-source tool used to track bugs and issues of a project or a software. It
helps the developers and other stakeholders to keep track of outstanding problems with the
product

 It was written by Terry Weissman in TCL programming language in 1998.


 Later, Bugzilla was written in PERL and it uses the MYSQL database.

 Bugzilla can be used as a Test Management tool since it can be easily linked with other
test case management tools like Quality Centre, ALM, Testlink, etc.

 Bugzilla provides a powerful, easy to use solution to configuration management and
replication problems.

 It can dramatically increase the productivity and accountability of an individual by
providing a documented workflow and positive feedback for good performance.

Most commercial and defect-tracking software vendors charged enormous licensing fees in the
starting days of Bugzilla. As a result, Bugzilla quickly became a favorite among the open-source
users, due to its genesis in the open-source browser project with Mozilla. It is now the most
precious defect-tracking system against which all the others are measured.

Bugzilla puts the power in an individual’s hand to improve the value of business while providing
a usable framework for natural attention to detail and knowledge store to flourish.

Bugzilla – Key Features

Bugzilla has many keys as well as advanced features, which makes it unique. Following is a
list of some of Bugzilla’s most significant features:

 Bugzilla is powerful and it has advanced searching capabilities.

 Bugzilla supports user configurable email notifications whenever the bug status
changes.

 Bugzilla displays the complete bug change history.

 Bugzilla provides inter bug dependency track and graphic representation.

 Bugzilla allows users to attach Bug supportive files and manage it.

 Bugzilla has integrated, product-based, granular security schema that makes it more
secure.

 It has complete security audit and runs under the Perl’s taint mode.

 Bugzilla supports a robust, stable RDBMS (Rational Data Base Management System)
back end.

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 It supports Web, XML, E-Mail and console interfaces.

 Bugzilla has a wide range of customized, user preferences features.

 It supports localized web user interface.

 Extensive configurability as it allows to be configured with other test management tools

for a better user experience.

 Bugzilla has a smooth upgrade pathway among different versions.

In the next chapter, we will discuss the prerequisites for installing Bugzilla.

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 2. Bugzilla – Installation Prerequisites Bugzilla

To install and run Bugzilla on the server, the core requirement is to have Perl installed. This
means that Bugzilla can be installed on any platform, where Perl can be installed; including
Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Hardware Requirements
 It is recommended to have a 4 GB RAM or more.

 Should have a Fast Processor, for instance, at least 3GHz or more.

 The hard disk space depends on the size of the team and the number of defects. A
50GB hard disk memory is a quite enough.

Software Requirements
Bugzilla requires a database server, a web server and Perl. In all the cases, (the newer, the
better) the newer releases have more bug fixes, but they are still supported and they still get
security fixes from time to time.

 Perl: Bugzilla 4.4 and older requires Perl 5.8.1 or newer, but Bugzilla 5.0 and newer
will require Perl 5.10.1 or newer. It is not recommend installing Perl 5.8.x at this stage.
Instead, install Perl 5.12 or newer, as these newer versions have some useful
improvements, which will give better user experience.

 Database Server: Bugzilla supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQLite. MySQL
and PostgreSQL are highly recommended, as they have the best support from Bugzilla
and are used daily by the Bugzilla developers. Oracle has several known issues and is
a 2nd-class citizen. It should work decently in most cases, but may fail miserably in
some cases too. SQLite is recommended for testing purposes only for small teams.
If MySQL is used, version 5.0.15 is required by Bugzilla 4.x, but highly recommended
version 5.5 or newer. For PostgreSQL installation, version 8.3 is required.

 Web Server: Bugzilla has no minimum requirements for its web server. It is
recommended to install Apache 2.2, although Bugzilla works fine with IIS too (IIS 7 or
higher recommended). To improve performances in Apache, recommend to enable its
mod_perl module.

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 3. Bugzilla ─ Installation Bugzilla

The Bugzilla GIT website is the best way to get Bugzilla. Download and install GIT from the
website – https://git-scm.com/download and Run it.

git clone --branch release-X.X-stable https://github.com/bugzilla/bugzilla

C:\bugzilla

Where, "X.X" is the 2-digit version number of the stable release of Bugzilla (e.g. 5.0)

The another way to download Bugzilla is from the following link –

https://www.bugzilla.org/download/ and move down to the Stable Release section and select
the latest one from the list as shown in the following screenshot. Click on Download Bugzilla
5.0.3.

Bugzilla comes as a 'tarball' (.tar.gz extension), which any competent Windows archiving tool
should be able to open.

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PERL Modules
Bugzilla requires a number of Perl modules to be installed. Some of them are mandatory, and
some others, which enable additional features, are optional.

In ActivePerl, these modules are available in the ActiveState repository, and are installed
with the ppm tool. Either it can use it on the command line or just type ppm and the user will
get a GUI.

Install the following mandatory modules with the following command.

ppm install <modulename>

Some of the most important PERL modules have been described below.

 CGI.pm – It is an extensively used Perl module for programming the CGI (Common
Gateway Interface) web applications. It helps to provide a consistent API for receiving
and processing user inputs.

 Digest-SHA – The Digest-SHA1 module allows you to use the NIST SHA-1 message
digest algorithm from within the Perl programs. The algorithm takes as input a
message of arbitrary length and produces as output a 160-bit "fingerprint" or
"message digest" of the input.

 TimeDate – TimeDate is a class for the representation of time/date combinations,

and is part of the Perl TimeDate project.

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 DateTime – DateTime is a class for the representation of date/time combinations,

and is part of the Perl DateTime project.

 DateTime-TimeZone – This class is the base class for all time zone objects. A time
zone is represented internally as a set of observances, each of which describes the
offset from GMT for a given time period.

 DBI – It is the standard database interface module for Perl. It defines a set of
methods, variables and conventions that provide a consistent database interface
independent of the actual database being used.

 Template-Toolkit – The Template Toolkit is a collection of Perl modules, which

implement a fast, flexible, powerful and extensible template processing system. It can
be used for processing any kind of text documents and is input-agnostic.

 Email-Sender – The Email-Sender replaces the old and problematic email send
library, which did a decent job at handling the simple email sending tasks, but it was
not suitable for serious use for a several reasons.

 Email-MIME – This is an extension of the Email-Simple module. It is majorly used to

handle MIME encoded messages. It takes a message as a string, splits it into its
constituent parts and allows you to access the different parts of the message.

 URI – A Uniform Resource Identifier is a compact string of characters that identifies

an abstract or physical resource. A URI can be further classified as either a Uniform
Resource Locator (URL) or a Uniform Resource Name (URN).

 List-MoreUtils – It provides some trivial but commonly needed functionality on lists,

which is not going to go into the List-Util module.

 Math-Random-ISAAC – The ISAAC (Indirection, Shift, Accumulate, Add, and Count)

algorithm is designed to take some seed information and produce seemingly random
results as the output.

 File-Slurp – This module provides subs that allow you to read or write files with one
simple call. They are designed to be simple, have flexible ways to pass in or get the
file content and are very efficient.

 JSON-XS – This module converts the Perl data structures to JSON and vice versa. The
primary goal of JSON-XS is to be correct and its secondary goal is to be fast.

 Win32 – The Win32 module contains functions to access Win32 APIs.

 Win32-API – With this module, you can import and call arbitrary functions from the
Win32's Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL), without having to write an XS extension.

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 DateTime-TimeZone-Local-Win32 – This module provides methods for determining

the local time zone on a Windows platform.

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