Bugzilla works better with Mylyn

In the last few weeks of working at Symbian, I have become a heavy user of Bugzilla. Bugzilla is the bug tracker that is used to track bugs in the Symbian platform; it is also used to track web site bugs and improvements.

You may wonder why I am using Bugzilla so much. It started, as I needed to monitor what problems the contributor community has with the web-site. And sometimes it was necessary to nudge Foundation staff along, when bugs that were important to my community got stuck. I quickly found myself in a situation where I was monitoring up to 40 bugs at a time. We also started using Bugzilla to manage administrative change requests such as changes in package owners, awarding committer rights, etc.

The Bugzilla Web Interface

The web interface of Bugzilla is OK, but it does have a number of weaknesses such as:

» The UI does not scale well when handling a large number of bugs
» There is no easy way to find out when a bug has changed
» One gets an awful lot of e-mail notifications
» It does not handle conflicts very well
In a nutshell Bugzilla works, but the usability could be much better. As a consequence, I spent much more time than I expected dealing with Bugzilla. I sometimes lost track of bugs.

Better Tools

Luckily 2 weeks ago, our Bugzilla installation was configured such that it could be used with the open source tool Mylyn, an Eclipse plug-in that works on top of Eclipse based IDEs, such as Carbide. I am also a user of the commercialized stand-alone version of Mylyn, called Tasktop Pro, which enables me to use Mylyn outside the IDE, and adds extra features such as mail and calendar integration. Mylyn is now a regular part of my work environment, and I published instructions on how to install and configure on our Wiki [link].

My Life Transformed

Mylyn has transformed my experience with Bugzilla. I can easily stay on top of bugs through 6 bug queries that I have defined. These are neatly displayed in a task list that shows dependencies amongst bugs. As a result I frequently use dependencies in Bugzilla now: something I have not used before. The best thing about the task list is that changes to bugs are indicated through appropriate icons. I also like the quick search feature and integrated support to attach screenshots.

One thing that is noteworthy is that queries and bugs are cached on my PC: this means I can work on public transport, without an internet connection. I can synchronize with Bugzilla repositories as needed. What is nice is that write conflicts to Bugzilla are resolved seamlessly: the web interface does not do this well.

I also like the rich Eclipse editor for tasks. It makes it easier to navigate through a bug, and has nice features such as hyperlinks and Wiki formatting, e.g. if I type ”Bug 1234” anywhere, a hyperlink is created which I can follow by just clicking on it.

Mylyn also provides other functionality to increases productivity. To be honest, I have not explored these much, but you may want to have a look at the MyLyn get started page. Another good source of information is Mik Kersten’s blog. Mik leads the Mylyn project and is the CEO of Tasktop.

Enough swarming: I would just like to encourage you to give it a go!

P.S.: I have written this blog entry with ScribeFire, another lovely open source tool

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