Bug Juice

With any Software Development project (open-source or closed), the project team will eventually run into bugs within their project. A bug in terms of software is not an insect but an error, flaw, failure, or fault in a computer program or system. The reason the term "bug" is used in computer science (even though "bug" has been used in engineering to describe errors and faults) is because one of the earliest cases of an error within a computer system was actually caused by real bug/insect. In 1947 Operators at the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory traced an error in the Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay, thus coining the term bug. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book.


Audacity, as is the case with many other open-source projects, uses Bugzilla to keep track of the bugs within the Audacity project. Bugzilla is a "Defect Tracking System" or "Bug-Tracking System". Defect Tracking Systems allow individual or groups of developers to keep track of outstanding bugs in their product effectively. Specifically what Bugzilla does is:

• Track bugs and code changes
• Communicate with teammates
• Submit and review patches
• Manage quality assurance (QA)

And the best part about Bugzilla is that its FREE (well there is a subscription based version with a few more features, but only large projects that already have financial backing truly would want this).

Audacity lists all its bugs in terms of a priority level:

• P1: These bugs prevent a new release, including most reproducible crashes and regressions.
• P2: These bugs still open when the release process starts can be fixed or not at the discretion of the Release Manager. Unfixed bugs must be release noted.
• P3: These bugs are lower severity bugs which must still be release noted.
• P4 and P5: These bugs are not release noted. Many of these may be "enhancement issues".

My teams primary focus will be bugs around the P4 and P5 levels since the higher priority bugs should be handled by senior members of the Audacity Project who are much more experienced with the whole process of bug-fixing in Audacity. I myself want to look at bugs having to deal with the Nyquist portion of Audacity since I'm very interested in the Nyquist language. There are currently 15 bugs of this type, which can be seen in this list produced by Bugzilla.