The Bug Squad

The Bug Squad is an essential asset in progressing Ubuntu and its flavours; the Bug Squad is the first point of contact for bugs filed about Ubuntu.

Who is in the Bug Squad?

Anyone interested in triaging bugs can join the Bug Squad. The members are primarily volunteers from around the world and they come together with a common cause of making Ubuntu better for everyone.

No special knowledge or training is required, just a desire to help!

What the team does

What the Bug Squad does is also known as “triaging”, which is similar to the process of prioritizing patients in a hospital based on the severity of their condition.

This allows developers to spend their time more effectively, and is a great way to learn about how Ubuntu works as an operating system and as a community. It’s also not uncommon for triagers to discover new and interesting features they didn’t know about!

Triaging bugs consists of:

  • Responding to new bugs as they are filed

  • Ensuring that new bugs have all the necessary information

  • Assigning bugs to the proper package

  • Confirming bug reports by trying to reproduce them

  • Setting the importance of bugs reports (Ubuntu Bug Controlteam only)

  • Searching for and marking duplicates in the bug tracking system

  • Sending bugs to their upstream authors, when applicable

  • Cross-referencing bugs from other distributions

  • Expiring old bugs

Bug triage is an excellent way to start helping out. You get to learn a lot about Ubuntu, its available packages, its infrastructure, and you get a feel for the development pulse.

Another big part of what we do is help new members to triage bugs. On average, over 1,800 bugs are filed every week with more than 500,000 bugs filed so far. The Bug Squad is always in NEED of more help from the community!

Contact the squad

  • IRC: #ubuntu-bugs channel to contact Ubuntu Bug Squad members for help or collaboration.

  • Mailing List: sign up to the ubuntu-bugsquad to contact us if you have any doubt while triaging a bug.

Want to join?

If you want to join the Bug Squad team you need to:

If you completed the previous steps, apply for membership on the Bug Squad team at Launchpad.

When joining the Bug Squad, please keep up-to-date with bug management policies. Changes are always announced on the mailing list. For further information feel free to subscribe to the wiki changes or check with other members on #ubuntu-bugs channel on libera.

Now, please read this page for more detailed instructions.

Note

This section may not be up to date

Activities

  • The Bug Squad regularly runs Hug Days. This is a great way to work with people and learn by getting your hands dirty right away.

  • Want to start practising with trivial to handle bugs? Visit the One Hundred Papercuts project to make it a nutshell!

  • Want to do a little everyday? Join the 5-a-day team to keep Ubuntu healthy!