How to Mark Regressions

Regressions

For regression bugs in Mozilla-Central, our policy is to tag the bug as a regression, identify the commits which caused the regression, then mark the bugs associated with those commits as causing the regression.

What is a regression?

A regression is a bug (in our scheme a defect) introduced by a changeset.

  • Bug 101 fixes Bug 100 with Change Set A

  • Bug 102 reported which describes previously correct behavior now not happening

  • Bug 102 investigated and found to be introduced by Change Set A

Marking a Regression Bug

These things are true about regressions:

  • Bug Type is defect

  • Keywords include regression

  • Status_FirefoxNN is affected for each version (in current nightly, beta, and release) of Firefox in which the bug was found

  • The bug’s description covers previously working behavior which is no longer working [ed. I need a better phrase for this]

Until the change set which caused the regression has been found through mozregression or another bisection tool, the bug should also have the regressionwindow-wanted keyword.

Once the change set which caused the regression has been identified, remove the regressionwindow-wanted keyword and set the Regressed By field to the id of the bug associated with the change set.

Setting the Regressed By field will update the Regresses field in the other bug.

Set a needinfo for the author of the regressing patch asking them to fix or revert the regression.

Previous Method

Previously we over-loaded the Blocks and Blocked By fields to track the regression, setting Blocks to the id of the bug associated with the change set causing the regression, and using the regression, regressionwindow-wanted keywords and the status flags as described above.

This made it difficult to understand what was a dependency and what was a regression when looking at dependency trees in Bugzilla.

FAQs

To be written