Gervase Markham - mozilla.org

The Bugzilla Story: Evolution under Pressure

Bugzilla is the leading free software bug-tracking system used by Gnome, Red Hat, NASA, and many other organisations. It began as a hacked-together collection of simple TCL scripts used internally at Netscape and has grown, under pressure from its users and the Mozilla project, into a robust Perl web application against which other bug-tracking systems are measured.

I'll begin with an introduction to Bugzilla, and an explanation and demonstration of its current feature set, but the main part of the talk will be a trip through Bugzilla's short but eventful history - from those original TCL scripts to the widely-used Perl application of today.

The bug system is the central communication mechanism of any medium-to-large free software project - at least, any one which has bugs :-) Over the past four years, Bugzilla has been forced to develop as the Mozilla project got bigger, and hit social, political, organisational and technical scaling issues which needed addressing in code. After talking to those who have hacked on Bugzilla from the beginning, I am able to present the fascinating history of how, and more importantly why, Bugzilla changed and evolved at different periods during that time.

This talk will not be particularly technical, and it is hoped it will appeal to everyone.