Bug Triage

Triage, the process of reviewing incoming bug tickets, gathering more information about the situation, and verifying whether or not the report is valid, is a critical part of the day-to-day operation of all of our projects. Some new tickets are valuable reports of broken behavior, others are suggestions for enhancements both large and small, and some are, in fact, not bugs at all. Identifying which issues are which and facilitating timely communication between the reporter and the contributors whose input is necessary to resolve the problem are all parts of the triage process.

link Why Triage?

For a newcomer, triage is a natural way to find the pulse of a project and see what other contributors will be thinking about on any given day (because they're also helping with triage), as well as interacting with the team and making yourself part of the process! It's also a good way to increase the breadth of your exposure to a particular project; the process of verifying bugs will encourage in-depth looks at parts of code and functionality with which you weren't already familiar. And if you're hoping to eventually contribute code, helping with triage is a great way to identify the bugs that need to be fixed and observe how others go about solving similar problems.

link How Do I Help?

You can help with triage for as many or as few projects as you're interested in. The process is relatively similar for all of them:

  1. Figure out a way that works for you to get a steady stream of new issues.
  2. When new issues are reported, reply politely with an appropriate response based on the situation. You may need to ask for more information, a simplified test case (or a test case at all), duplicate the reported behavior using a provided test case (or reducing one further), or direct the reporter to the right venue for their issue.
  3. Participate in the discussion as it continues, as necessary.

Here's how to accomplish Step 1 above for each of our projects:

link GitHub Issues

For the most part, jQuery Foundation projects keep track of bugs using GitHub issues. All you have to do is sign up for a GitHub account if you don't already have one. From there on out, it's as simple as "watching" the repositories you want to help triage. New issues and comments will make their way to your notification center and inbox, depending on your notification settings.

link jQuery UI

jQuery UI uses Trac, an open source standalone bug tracking system, and is hosted at bugs.jqueryui.com.

You can keep up to date with new bugs as they are reported by visiting the timeline, but we recommend signing up to receive email notifications when new bugs are reported and receive new comments. Most of the regular triagers use email notifications to stay on top of things as they happen, as it tends to make it easier to digest activity on the tracker since the last time you checked. You can set up your email preferences on the subscriptions tab of your Trac preferences. We also reccomend setting up a rule in your email client to keep bug emails relatively self-contained.

link Projects

link Documentation

link Web Sites