A Bug's Life Cycle

The status and resolution field define and track the life cycle of a bug.

STATUS

RESOLUTION
The status field indicates the general health of a bug. Only certain status transitions are allowed. The resolution field indicates what happened to this bug.
UNCONFIRMED
This bug has recently been added to the database. Nobody has validated that this bug is true. Users who have the "canconfirm" permission set may confirm this bug, changing its state to NEW. Or, it may be directly resolved and marked RESOLVED.
NEW
This bug has recently been added to the assignee's list of bugs and must be processed. Bugs in this state may be accepted, and become ASSIGNED, passed on to someone else, and remain NEW, or resolved and marked RESOLVED.
ASSIGNED
This bug is not yet resolved, but is assigned to the proper person. From here bugs can be given to another person and become NEW, or resolved and become RESOLVED.
REOPENED
This bug was once resolved, but the resolution was deemed incorrect. For example, a WORKSFORME bug is REOPENED when more information shows up and the bug is now reproducible. From here bugs are either marked ASSIGNED or RESOLVED.
No resolution yet. All bugs which are in one of these "open" states have the resolution set to blank. All other bugs will be marked with one of the following resolutions.
RESOLVED
A resolution has been taken, and it is awaiting verification by QA. From here bugs are either re-opened and become REOPENED, are marked VERIFIED, or are closed for good and marked CLOSED.
VERIFIED
QA has looked at the bug and the resolution and agrees that the appropriate resolution has been taken. Bugs remain in this state until the product they were reported against actually ships, at which point they become CLOSED.
CLOSED
The bug is considered dead, the resolution is correct. Any zombie bugs who choose to walk the earth again must do so by becoming REOPENED.
FIXED
A fix for this bug is checked into the tree and tested.
INVALID
The problem described is not a bug
WONTFIX
The problem described is a bug which will never be fixed.
LATER
The problem described is a bug which will not be fixed in this version of the product.
REMIND
The problem described is a bug which will probably not be fixed in this version of the product, but might still be.
DUPLICATE
The problem is a duplicate of an existing bug. Marking a bug duplicate requires the bug# of the duplicating bug and will at least put that bug number in the description field.
WORKSFORME
All attempts at reproducing this bug were futile, reading the code produces no clues as to why this behavior would occur. If more information appears later, please re-assign the bug, for now, file it.

Other Fields

Severity

This field describes the impact of a bug.

Blocker Blocks development and/or testing work
Critical crashes, loss of data, severe memory leak
Major major loss of function
Minor minor loss of function, or other problem where easy workaround is present
Trivial cosmetic problem like misspelled words or misaligned text
Enhancement Request for enhancement

Priority

This field describes the importance and order in which a bug should be fixed. This field is utilized by the programmers/engineers to prioritize their work to be done. The available priorities are:

P1 Most important
P2
P3
P4
P5 Least important

Platform

This is the hardware platform against which the bug was reported. Legal platforms include: Note: Selecting the option "All" does not select bugs assigned against all platforms. It merely selects bugs that occur on all platforms.

Operating System

This is the operating system against which the bug was reported. Legal operating systems include: Note that the operating system implies the platform, but not always. For example, Linux can run on PC and Macintosh and others.

Assigned To

This is the person in charge of resolving the bug. Every time this field changes, the status changes to NEW to make it easy to see which new bugs have appeared on a person's list. The default status for queries is set to NEW, ASSIGNED and REOPENED. When searching for bugs that have been resolved or verified, remember to set the status field appropriately.
Last modified: Sun Apr 14 12:51:23 EST 2002