Filing good bugs

Getting started working on a bug can be hard, specially if you lack context.

This guide is meant to provide a list of steps to provide the necessary information to open an actionable bug.

  • Use a descriptive title. Avoid jargon and abbreviations where possible, they make it hard for other people to find existing bugs, and to understand them.

  • Explain the problem in depth and provide the steps to reproduce. Be as specific as possible, and include things such as operating system and version if reporting a bug.

  • If you can, list files and lines of code that may need to be modified. Ideally provide a patch for getting started. Do not hesitate to add permalinks to Searchfox pointing to the file and lines.

  • If applicable, provide a test case or document that can be used to test the bug is solved. For example, if the bug title was “HTML inspector fails when inspecting a page with one million of nodes”, you would provide an HTML document with one million of nodes, and we could use it to test the implementation, and make sure you’re looking at the same thing we’re looking at. You could use services like jsfiddle, codepen or jsbin to share your test cases. Other people use GitHub, or their own web server.

Good first bugs

If you’re looking to open a bug as a “good first bug” for new contributors, please adhere to the following guidelines:

  1. Complexity Ensure the bug is not overly complex. New contributors are already navigating the learning curve of Firefox’s codebase and workflows. An overly complicated bug can be overwhelming.

  2. Tagging Use the Bugzilla keyword good-first-bug to mark it appropriately.

  3. Language Specification In the whiteboard section, specify the primary language of the bug using the [lang=XX] format. For instance, [lang=C++] for C++ or [lang=py] for Python.

  4. Mentorship Commit to guiding the new contributor by adding yourself as a mentor for the bug. Please keep the mentor field up to date, if you no longer have time set it to empty or find another available mentor.

  5. Documentation Provide links to essential documentation that can assist the contributor. For example, you might include:

By following these guidelines, you’ll be setting up new contributors for success and fostering a welcoming environment for them.

These good first bugs can be browsed on https://codetribute.mozilla.org/