Mozilla's 100,000th Bug

benb writes: "bugzilla.mozilla.org just hit bug 100,000 (cached). This proves its scalability. BugZilla is used to track work on Mozilla. Every change has to have a bug. This includes new features and bugs found by developers/testers during development (bugs that never reached users). We also get a lot of duplicates (which dedicated triagers sort out). So, the number of filed closed bugs cannot be used as criteria of the quality of Mozilla. During usage, BugZilla evolved to a very comfortable web platform for filing/tracking bugs, one that has only very few competition (of which I know). Examples are the emailing and dependency systems. In fact, BugZilla is probably the most important communication medium used in the Mozilla project (apart from the source code itself)."

Comments

Lots of bugs == high quality

[HoserHead]

Unlike what most people think, a high bug count does not equal poor quality. A high bug count is actually a very good indicator of excellent testing, and this testing leads to high quality.

Mozilla is a very high-profile application, and is also very complex. A lot of people report bugs in it, ranging from showstopping to very trivial. I'm personally very encouraged that Mozilla has such good testing, because it directly translates into a better product.

Bottom line is: the more bugs, the better. (This is something a lot of people don't seem to recognise, particularly with Free Software development. When that user reports a bug you don't like, thank them instead of closing it without fixing it! They're contributing to the quality of your software!)

Overlooked fact

[RogrWilco]

Mozilla has yet to reach 1.0, which they stated would be the equivalent of a production release. For al the linux bashers, that's 100,000 bugs which never made it to the release product.
Similarly, why did MS build bug reporting tools into XP and IE 6? To build a better product. Too bad that they are all basically new versions. Anyone know if this is in the final release?

Windows XP = Windows 95 v5.0
95->98->98se->me->XP!

On small problem I've had...

[pberry]

...is trying to figure out where a bug should be filed. The bug page is daunting, especially if you aren't familiar with modules and how they are broken down.

I only mention this because I run the nightly builds just about everyday and they ask us to help file bug reports.

This problem may be a combintation of bugzilla user interface and the complexity of the mozilla project though, and not just one or the other...

But if the developers like it, that is probably more important ;-)

Re:scalability

[Doc Hopper]

It is, unfortunately, true that Bugzilla is fairly easily swamped by massive traffic. We encourage the use of mod_throttle on Apache for just this reason. Often, web spiders attempt to index publicly-available Bugzilla sites, and that can basically amount to a denial-of-service attack.

I think you'll find this is true with most heavily dynamic, database-driven web sites. I'd ultimately love to get better scalability than Slashdot out of Bugzilla, but in the near-term we're trying to avoid dependencies on mod_perl and certain other areas of performance enhancement because they cause dependencies on certain types of web servers.

There is some heavy discussion going on amongst the Bugzilla developers about using some kind of caching method to prevent slashdotting of Bugzilla in the future, but for now it's not there. Contributions welcome!