Bug Days

What, when, where?

A Bug day is a day when we get together on IRC, find bugs and clean our bug database Bugzilla so that developers can get more work done by focusing on bugs that matter instead of wasting their time on duplicates, unconfirmable bugs and problems that they've already resolved. What we basically do is called 'triaging', i.e. analysing and processing fault reports in Bugzilla.

But of course you can hop by the IRC channel at any time. Sometimes we're a bit busy or are not sitting in front of our computers, but there are usually always some folks around. Please be patient when waiting for response. You could also get started by cleaning up some of ../YourOwnBugs.

Who can be helpful at a bug day?

Virtually anyone. Bug day can be for the very timid, the very quiet or the very persistent. Your help is really useful, because if every person who reads planet.gnome.org cleaned up one bug, we'd have all unconfirmed bugs in the bugzilla database cleaned up in a single day.

You should have:

• decent ability to read English
• a user-level knowledge of GNOME
• 30 or so minutes of the day (the first time, after that you can do it in very small chunks.)

You don't need:

• any programming ability
• any prior experience with QA (quality assurance)
• a deep understanding of GNOME.

On the other hand, if you do have programming skills it's also a great way to get involved - after a few bug days, you can figure out quickly what needs help in GNOME and apply your talents there. See JoinGnome for other possibilities on how you can contribute to GNOME.

Who can I talk to in IRC?

Anybody! The bugsquadders are available for helping and guiding you!

Please DO speak English in the channel so everybody can understand (and help) you. In general, you can talk to most people in the channel, at any time and any day. Persons with (*) are entitled to grant bugsquad permissions.

If you don't know how to convert your local time to UTC you can use this timezone converter.

Topic

The following bug reports are slated to be a good starting point for beginners.

• Bugs filed in the last 7 dazs

For more information, please read our ../TriageGuide, including how to triage in eight easy steps, to get some better idea of the process.