Designed as a bug tracking system, Bugzilla also gets used for everything from trouble ticketing to planning a wedding.

by Jeff Goldman [July 26, 2006]

Bugzilla was originally created in the mid-90s to track bugs during the development of the Netscape web browser. Dave Miller, Bugzilla's current project lead, says Bugzilla was developed very quickly. "It was basically a collection of TCL scripts," he says. "They were inventing something to fill the need."

Netscape open-sourced Bugzilla, along with the Netscape 5 code, Miller says, in 1998—at which point they rewrote it in Perl instead of TCL, with the expectation that Perl would attract more users. Miller first used Bugzilla as a bug tracker for a software project he was developing, got involved with the project, and wound up running it.

Like Netscape 5, Miller says, Bugzilla wasn't in great shape when the code was first released. "It was something that had been quickly thrown together and was just enough to get the job done," he says. "Over the last couple of years, there's been a lot of cleaning up of the code, and the feature set has been getting extended towards things that companies would use, rather than just open source projects."

Beyond bug tracking
The way that bugs are tracked within Bugzilla, Miller says, is flexible enough that it's attracted a lot of converts. "The lifecycle of bugs was something that a lot of people in other open source projects could relate to and adopt easily," he says. "And after a lot of open source projects started using it, companies starting seeing it and saying, 'This looks like something that we could use.'"

Bugzilla's use of dependencies, Miller says, makes it efficient as well. "You can set up a bug and put a list of dependencies on it, so you group your tasks together," he says. "You can file a bug for a big project that you want to do, and then as you're figuring out the pieces of it that need to be done, you can file a bug for each of those pieces and make it depend on that first one."

The system's flexibility means that Bugzilla gets used for a lot more than just bug tracking. "Somebody left a comment on one of the version tracking sites saying they had used it to plan their wedding, as a task list," Miller says. "They filed a bug for each thing they needed to do, then they'd resolve the bug as they got each thing done."

Replace 'bug' with 'trouble ticket,' and Bugzilla can be used for trouble ticketing. "One of the strengths towards using it as a ticket system is that if you've got it on your external website, your customers can come in and file their own tickets—and it can be set so that they get an e-mail every time somebody updates the bug, to tell them what's going on with their ticket, so they're always in the loop," Miller says.

Newer versions of Bugzilla, Miller says, have added privacy and security options, allowing administrators to determine who can view particular types of bugs or tickets. "At an ISP, for example, the techs can make a comment to each other about what's going on with the bug that wouldn't necessarily be available to the customer," Miller says.

Installation and support
The process of installing Bugzilla, Miller says, has become much simpler than it was in the past. "It's a little bit more difficult to set up if you're running it on Windows, but on Linux in particular, almost all of the prerequisites are already distributed by most of the major vendors now," he says. "That makes the setup a lot easier than it used to be."

Free support is available on a number of mailing lists as well as an IRC channel, and there's also a seemingly endless list of companies offering paid support, installation, and customization. "Mostly, those kinds of services are used by people that want to customize Bugzilla," Miller says.

When you're trying to modify the application, Miller says, it's often worth paying for guidance. "Because Bugzilla is such a large application, if you're doing something more than just a minor customization, it helps a lot to have somebody that's really familiar with Bugzilla code on the back-end already, so you don't have to go through and figure out where everything is in the process of trying to add something," he says.

As Bugzilla heads towards version 3.0, the project roadmap includes an interface redesign aimed at simplification. "One of the complaints we get about Bugzilla is that some people are scared by it, because the form for a bug has so many fields on it that it's just overwhelming," Miller says. "So we're trying to find a way to redo it so that it's not quite so scary."

Another key addition that's currently in progress, Miller says, is support for additional back-end databases. The project currently supports MySQL and PostgreSQL and plans to add support for Oracle. "We're looking to have that done by the time we've got version 3.0 coming out—which is probably going to be somewhere between September and November of this year," he says.

— End

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