Grails bugs… Jira our asses please!
It always frustrates me when I find bugs. Not because the bug is there, but because I am sure that in many cases I am not the first person to have hit the problem. All too many people I know hit a problem, and then just work around it and that’s that.
It’s so incredibly vital, especially with volunteer open source projects, to report and document as well as possible any issues that you find.
To expect the developers of all the great open source software out there to not only create new features and fix bugs found but also to find all the bugs is wanting to have your cake and eat it!
So it is for this reason, that I as a self-confessed Jira fanboy, always always always create a jira issue for every problem I hit. Sometimes even before I can find any sign of a root cause. A forgotten bug report is lost time for everyone – for you as a user, who may hit it again and find it is still not fixed, but also for us as developers as we want to get rid of as many bugs as possible in every release.
So please if you hit a Grails bug, JIRA our asses! If you don’t have a JIRA account already, create one, it only takes a few seconds.
Bug reports are like code coverage reports. They show gaps in our unit testing and improve the quality of the product as a whole. You can never have too many bug reports – but quality is important too!
7 Comments
helmut denk
June 19, 2007i agree, but in addition some important rules should be mentioned:
before creating a jiira issue THINK !
get sure, that your problem is really a bug. in many
cases it is not !
always ! look for existing jiira issues that address
your bug plus google for it.
Marc Palmer
June 19, 2007Just in case anybody thinks I’m not walking the walk here, check out my hideous jira issue stats for Grails… I have raised 29% of all Grails issues to date (19 Jun 2007), totalling 373 issues and counting.
…this means that my major contributions to date are actually issues, probably more time spent typing issues than code LOL.
Marc Palmer
June 19, 2007Helmut… you have a point and I have often raised issues that were my own fault / misunderstanding.
However I think it is always better to capture a problem, and close it as “Won’t fix” later. It is all too easy to hit a problem and because of work time pressures not be able to research it and just work around it. I’d rather have the problem logged.
Daniel.Sun
June 21, 2007Hi Marc,
Maybe I am a newbie for Grails, so I can not make sure some problems I encounter are issues.
But I will raise issues if I am sure they are, I don’t want to waste the time of Grails developers
Best regards,
Daniel.Sun
Craig Jones
January 29, 2008Daniel… for ideas on other ways you can (fearlessly) support GRAILS, besides reporting bugs, see my colleague’s article, “12 Ways To Jack Up Your Favorite Open-Source Project”
http://www.codejacked.com/12-ways-to-jack-up-your-favorite-open-source-project-part-1
Javed
June 17, 2009I just start playing with Grails and seems like it is full of bugs…and no easy way to tell what is wrong. May be I am new or it still needs few years to mature.
Marc Palmer
June 18, 2009Javed – what problems are you happening. Of course, like all great software there are bugs. If can be tricky to find out what’s gone wrong, that’s part of the trade off of a dynamic language.
However logging and error messages should be improved to reduce this.
So what kind of issues do you have, and do you have stacktraces to share? Please ask on the grails user mailing list.