2.1. What is Bugzilla?

Bugzilla is a bug- or issue-tracking system. Bug-tracking systems allow individual or groups of developers effectively to keep track of outstanding problems with their product. Bugzilla was originally written by Terry Weissman in a programming language called TCL, to replace a rudimentary bug-tracking database used internally by Netscape Communications. Terry later ported Bugzilla to Perl from TCL, and in Perl it remains to this day. Most commercial defect-tracking software vendors at the time charged enormous licensing fees, and Bugzilla quickly became a favorite of the open-source crowd (with its genesis in the open-source browser project, Mozilla). It is now the de-facto standard defect-tracking system against which all others are measured.

Bugzilla boasts many advanced features. These include:

• Powerful searching

• User-configurable email notifications of bug changes

• Full change history

• Inter-bug dependency tracking and graphing

• Excellent attachment management

• Integrated, product-based, granular security schema

• Fully security-audited, and runs under Perl's taint mode

• A robust, stable RDBMS back-end

• Web, XML, email and console interfaces

• Completely customisable and/or localisable web user interface

• Extensive configurability

• Smooth upgrade pathway between versions