The Bugmaster

Mozilla currently lacks engineers who are hired to look after bugs on any given project. The "Bugmaster" is a position that, although defined differently across open-source projects and organizations, has been incredibly useful when implemented. This is a quick explanation of the position as a proposal for hiring such people at Mozilla.

The bugmaster is an engineer who spends the majority of his or her time reading through incoming bugs for the particular project she is assigned to. While reading through, the bugmaster triages the bugs by ranking the severity, priority, and assignment. The bugmaster works to identify duplicates, dependencies, and gets more information on ambiguous bugs. The bugmaster also takes time to validate and verify bugs with an eye towards easy fixes and determining if the bug belongs to another group. If the bug does belong to another group, the bugmaster helps drive the importance of the bug for prioritization with the engineers and PM for the other group. In essence, the bugmaster improves the quality of bug information for all members of the team and the organization as a whole.

In addition, a great bugmaster will help create tools to automate tasks related to the bug system, collect data from the system in readable ways to help the team understand the status of the project, and work with the bugzilla group to help identify enhancements, fixes, and issues within the system itself.

Two things a bugmaster can ask during his work are:

1. What is the quality of the bugs overall

   Are the bugs reproduceable? is the information pertinant to the current version of the software? is there enough information here for the bugmaster or another developer to understand the issue and where the problem occurs? Are there multiple issues in one bug that needs to be separated?

2. What do our bugs say about our software?

   Are the bugs better answered by a change in architecture or approach? A better UI/UX? Are we answering the needs of the community or do the bugs show we are not? Are the feature requests coming in in-line with the product plan? Is the strategic vision of the project in-line with what is happening in the bug system?

While there are elements to the position that overlap with QA, this is not an official QA position - This person does not necessarily seek out bugs, though she might create automated tests to look for common bugs that are seen which, in turn, would spawn focus on other issues.

• The bugmaster needs to be engaged with the community and able to get others more engaged.
• They need to be extremely organized and able to recognize patterns quick to draw conclusions from scattered data points.
• While they need to be willing to do some gruntwork and get their hands dirty, they also need to enable others to get involved in ignored and high priority problems, and be able to do so across teams.
• The bugmaster needs to buy in to standards and be a guide in helping people adhere to the standards of the project, the open web, and the project's bug tracking methods.
• They need to be engaged with the project's direction and strategy as well as other project's direction, and Mozilla's direction as well.
• The bugmaster needs to be the user's advocate within the project and within Mozilla.