Bugzilla - Design

Design

While the potential exists in the code to turn Bugzilla into a technical support ticket system, task management tool, or project management tool, Bugzilla's developers have chosen to focus on the task of designing a system to track software defects. Mandated design requirements include:

• The ability to run on freely available, open source tools. While Bugzilla development includes work to support commercial databases, tools, and operating systems.
• The maintenance of speed and efficiency at all costs. One of Bugzilla's major attractions to developers is its lightweight implementation and speed, so calls into the database are minimized whenever possible, data fetching is kept as light as possible, and generation of heavy HTML is avoided.
• Tickets. For instance, Mozilla.org and the MediaWiki project use it to track feature requests as well. In this case items (called bugs) can be submitted by anybody, and will be assigned to a particular developer. Various status updates for each bug are allowed, together with user notes and bug examples.

In practice, most Bugzilla projects allowing the public to file bugs—such as the Bugzilla bug database for Bugzilla itself—assign all bugs to a gatekeeper, whose job it is to assign responsibility and priority level.