Bug Writing Guidelines for AdiumTrac

This document is a modified version of the Mozilla bug writing guidelines. Additional, very good suggestions are offered by Eric Raymond's "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" and Simon Tatham's "How to Report Bugs Effectively". Please read this entire document before submitting tickets: it helps us fix bugs faster.

Useful bug reports are ones that get bugs fixed. A useful bug report normally has three qualities:

1. Reproducible:

If a developer can't see a bug or conclusively prove that it exists, the developer will probably not be able to fix it. He or she will move on to the next bug. Every relevant detail you provide helps.

2. Specific:

Give us details. If you're crashing on a certain action, please take the time to isolate what is triggering the crash, and include it in the bug report if possible. The quicker the developer can isolate the issue to a specific problem, the more likely it will be fixed in a timely manner.

3. Not a Duplicate:

Please search trac before filing bug reports. Try a variety of words in case the one you're using isn't the usual one to describe what you're talking about. Also, look through the ConceptIndexOfTickets to see if your bug is already there.

Let's say you crash while signing on to AIM, and want to write up a bug report:

BAD: "Adium crashed. I think I was on AIM. I think that this is a really bad problem and you should fix it or else nobody will use your program. By the way, my sister thinks your icons really suck. Oh, and my mom's messages don't look right, either, they're all messed up. Thx 4 fixing theze bugz."

GOOD: "Adium crashes immediately each time I sign on to my AIM account, using Adium 1.2 on a Mac OS X 10.5 system. Adium does not crash when I sign on to my MSN account. I am attaching the crash reports here."

If your problem is Adium crashing, attaching a crash log to the ticket is very helpful to developers trying to diagnose the problem. You can find instructions on getting a crash log here. Bug submissions that do not meet these "Useful Bug Report" criteria tend to be investigated last, or more likely closed as invalid.

Also, when filing bug reports or commenting on existing reports, please keep the comments related to fixing the bug. Comments like "Me too" or "I really want this fixed" or "You guys suck for not fixing this" are definitely not helpful unless we are asking for others to confirm that they can reproduce it. If this is the case then include steps to reproduce and all the information that ReportingBugs requests of you.

In general the "priority", "milestone", and "assign" fields shouldn't be set; we'll set these when we decide what to do with the ticket. Also, don't choose "accept ticket": that's for a developer to use to assign the ticket to himself.