Need information on voting for your favorite bugs in BASIS products? Look no further. Here is everything you need to know about voting in Bugzilla, including what it means to you and how to do it.

What Does it Mean to Vote for a Bug?

BASIS uses Bugzilla, an open source bug tracking system, to manage bugs and enhancement requests, hereafter together referred to as bugs, that are reported against the three BASIS products: BBj®, AddonSoftware®, and Barista®. Once a bug exists in Bugzilla (whether it was created by a developer, a tester, or a customer), it is available for all Bugzilla users to vote for. Voting is how you register your interest in seeing a particular bug addressed – how important it is to you that BASIS fixes it/applies the enhancement. This article explains how to vote, what happens when you vote, and how to manage your votes once you cast them.

Why Vote for a Bug?

Voting tells BASIS that you have an interest in certain bugs. This system helps the BASIS development team know which bugs are important to the most people, and ranks how important they are, helping BASIS to focus development resources on fixing bugs in an optimal order. In a perfect world, this would mean that the most important bugs get fixed first. In reality, this won’t always happen because not all bugs are equal – some bugs take a few minutes to fix, some take days to weeks, and some are architecturally significant (meaning that resolving them could require a re-architecture of one or more aspects of the product, affecting many or all of the users in different ways). You are allowed to cast up to 5 votes per bug, thereby rating your interest in seeing that bug fixed. We use that information to the best of our abilities as we strive to deliver better products.

Getting Started

In order to participate in Bugzilla voting, you must have a Bugzilla account.

NOTE: If you do not already have a Bugzilla account, send an email to bugzilla-admin@basis.cloud indicating whether you need an account for the BBj database (BBj) or for the AddonSoftware/Barista database (AB) or both.You will receive a confirmation email with your login information and the URL of the corresponding systems.

Figure 1 lists the products in each Bugzilla database for which you might be entering bugs.

Figure 1. The list of BASIS products and the Bugzilla database in which they reside

The AB (AddonSoftware/Barista) Bugzilla database is located at bugs.basis.cloud, and the BBj Bugzilla database is located at bugzilla.basis.cloud.

Finding a Bug of Interest

Once you are logged in to Bugzilla, locate bugs of interest to you by searching (using the “Search” screen) or when someone sends you a URL to a particular bug (possibly in response to a tech support conversation or from discussing problems on the bbj-developer list). Once you identify a bug of interest you will see a screen similar to Figure 2.

Figure 2. A Bugzilla Eclipse product bug with 5 votes

See Who has Voted for a Bug

To see who has voted for a particular bug, click on the “5 votes” hyperlink just to the right of the ‘Importance’ fields (see Figure 2). Bugzilla shows how many votes each person has cast for this bug.

Managing Your Votes

You are limited to a maximum of 50 votes per product and a maximum of 5 votes per bug so you need to manage your votes. Carefully consider how best to use your votes to indicate to BASIS what is important to you. Obviously, the more votes you cast on one bug, the more importance you are attaching to that bug. With a total of 50 votes, you must choose which bugs justify the maximum permitted of 5 votes and which may only warrant 1 or 2 votes.

Voting for Bugs

Once you have identified a bug of interest, click the “vote” hyperlink just to the right of the “5 votes” to bring up the “Change Votes” window shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. The Change Votes window

In the ‘Change Votes’ window you can vote for the bug you identified (in this case, 27356) as well as see and change your votes for all of the products in this Bugzilla database. You can cast a maximum of 50 votes per BASIS product. In the example in Figure 3, you have voted for bugs in the BBj and Documentation products, and you are about to vote for an Eclipse product bug.

To vote for a bug, enter the number of votes you want to cast, up to a maximum of 5 votes. The ‘Change Votes’ window reminds you of your limits with the text “N votes used out of 50 allowed” for each product and the text “Note: only 5 votes allowed per bug in this product”. Once you are satisfied with your votes, click [Change My Votes] to save your changes.

Being Notified About Bugs You Have Voted For

Bugzilla allows you to configure the email notifications you would like to receive about bugs for which you are a “Voter”. Figure 4 shows the main Bugzilla welcome screen, with three links you can click to display the ‘User Preferences’ window.

Figure 4. The three links to ‘User Preferences’ on the welcome screen

On the ‘Email Preferences’ tab, the ‘Field/recipient specific options’ table shown in Figure 5 offers a column for ‘Voter’.

Figure 5. The ‘Email Preferences’ for configuring voter email notifications

Mark or unmark the checkboxes in that column and click [Submit Changes] to save your choices. If a row in the ‘Voter’ column is checked, you will receive an email notification when the condition in the column on the right occurs and you have at least one vote cast for that bug.

Recovering Your Votes Once a Bug is Fixed

NOTE: Bugzilla does NOT automatically free up the votes on any bug when it is RESOLVED (fixed, rejected, and so on). You must manually recover any votes you have on bugs that are already RESOLVED since they count against your maximum vote counts.

If you look back at the ‘Change Votes’ window in Figure 3, you will see that bug 26028 is shown with a “strikethrough” as 26028. The strikethrough font on the bug number indicates that you are voting for a bug that is already RESOLVED. If you have configured Bugzilla to send you email notifications when you are a “Voter” and the status changes, you will already have received an email letting you know when it was RESOLVED. But in case you missed this email, you can return to this display at any time. Not only can you see where your votes are currently cast, you can also tell which votes are cast on bugs that are already RESOLVED (in case you want to recover them to use elsewhere).

NOTE: A shortcut permits you to go directly to the ‘Change Votes’ display. For BASIS’ two Bugzilla instances, the shortcut hyperlinks are:

https://bugs.basis.cloud/page.cgi?id=voting/user.html (for the Addon/Barista Bugzilla)
https://bugzilla.basis.cloud/page.cgi?id=voting/user.html (for the BBj Bugzilla)

Regardless of how you reach the ‘Change Votes’ display, you can recover the votes on any bug by simply changing the number field to the left of the bug number (5, which is to the left of 26028 in this example) to 0. Once you click [Change My Votes], the votes you recovered will be available to cast again.