Tuesday, February 27, 2007

What every developer would like to see

A few days ago, MySQL launched the Quality Contribution Program. The main purpose of that program is to improve the quality of submissions from active users. We published the rules, and soon we saw more reports coming our way, with better contents than usual.
The commotion happened yesterday evening, when I noticed a bug report that looked interesting. At a quick glance, it was. A clear description of the problem. Cool. An attached test case. Great! And a result file! Even better. And the closing remark, "See patch", was just too much to believe. So, there was a bug report telling us about a problem, including a clean way of reproducing it, and even saying where the problem is in the code and how to fix it!
It was already late in the day, but I told myself that it wouldn't take me too long to verify the claim. So I used the latest 5.0.38 build in my laptop and I ran the test case. Bingo! The problem was there, just as described. After inspecting the resulting data, I was satisfied that the claim was justified, and I noted that much in the test report. Then I alerted Chad Miller, my colleague in the Community-Engineering team, who in turn informed the leader of the team involved in that particular problem.
One hour later, the bug went from verified to patch pending, meaning that a developer had examined the patch, and it was considered up to company standards, ready for review.
Within two hours from its submission, the problem was virtually fixed!
The author of this exploit is Martin Friebe, who, not by chance, is leading the contributors list in our program.
Our goal in launching the Quality Contribution Program was exactly this: getting better bug reports, and Martin has shown the way.
Thanks Martin! Keep up the good work!

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