Bug Tracker

Second Life JIRA FAQ

What is JIRA?

The Second Life open source initiative uses Atlassian's JIRA project management tool for issue tracking. Located at jira.secondlife.com, this issue tracker offers a searchable database of issues submitted by the Second Life community. You, too, can submit issues you find when using the open source or standard versions of Second Life. Please familiarize yourself with the information in this page before proceeding to JIRA.

Need support?

If you're looking for help with your account, please use our support resources.

We recommend you thoroughly search them first and look for the latest news on the Official Linden Blog before reporting issues here.

JIRA is not for technical support-type requests, and entering them here makes it harder for us to keep track of issues, so if you're looking for personal assistance, please send your message to the right place by contacting support.

Bugs & New Features

• Please read QA Bug Submission Guidelines before submitting a a bug.
• You can also propose new features through JIRA. (JIRA is emerging to succeed the Feature Voting Tool with your help, because it has better search and parallels the way we Lindens internally organize issues. Plus, you can discuss with other Residents.)

User profile

• Each JIRA user has a profile. The profile consists of your Username (SL name), Fullname (in our case, also your SL name), and all of the JIRA groups you belong to. For most people, this means "jira-users."

• The email address associated with your account shall remain anonymous to other users. The address is not visible or configurable at this time. Direct import of your email address from Second Life's database is currently disabled.

• The JIRA profile is not editable because allowing changes would introduce conflicts with your Second Life account. If you wish to edit account information such as your email address, please login to the account management page at secondlife.com.

Projects and Components

• Projects are used to categorize issues into logical groups.
• Components are used to specify which part of a system the issue affects. In other words, what is the scope of the problem within a project.
• We have configured four different projects in JIRA, each with a number of components. They are:

Second Life Viewer (VWR)

Issues pertaining to the Second Life viewer are reported under this project.

Available components

• Avatar/Character
• Building
• Chat/IM
• Crashes
• Documentation
• Graphics
• Inventory
• Land
• Linden Dollars (L$)
• Missing Content
• Performance
• Permissions
• Physics
• Scripting
• Sound
• Stipends
• User Interface

Examples

• "My avatar clothing is all black after installing a video driver update" (Component = Avatar/Character)
• "Objects in my Inventory do not remain sorted in the correct order after logging out and back in again" (Component = Inventory)

Second Life Service (SVC)

Issues pertaining to the Second Life service are reported here.

Available components

• HTTPRequest
• Performance
• Physics
• Scripts
• Simulation
• Teleport
• XML-RPC

llGetDate() is returning the wrong date Observed at 10:30 PM PDT on March 19, llGetDate() returns 2007-03-20

Examples

• "Server performance decreases when several avatars teleport into the region at once" (Component = Performance and/or Teleport)
• "My scripted objects are not able to talk to the outside world after Second Life grid downtime" (Component = Scripts).

Second Life Website (WEB)

Issues pertaining to the Second Life website are in this project.

Available components

• Account summary
• blog.secondlife.com
• Developer Directory
• Events
• forums.secondlife.com
• Friends Online
• Interactive map
• jira.secondlife.com
• Land Store
• lindenlab.com
• Lindex
• New account creation
• secondlife.com
• wiki.secondlife.com

Examples

• "Wiki prevents login for users with a dash in their name" (Component = wiki.secondlife.com)
• "jira.secondlife.com always forces me to authenticate even if I save my login information" (Component = jira.secondlife.com).

Second Life Miscellaneous (MISC)

Any other type of issue should be reported in the MISC project.

Available component

• Miscellaneous

Example

• "The TOS does not allow me to edit the viewer source code" (Component = Miscellaneous)

Security Issues -- a.k.a "the missing Fifth Project"

Issues pertaining to the security of Second Life should be emailed to the Second Life Security mailing list rather than posted on jira.secondlife.com. Emailing them directly to Linden Lab helps us keep Second Life secure!

See security issues page for more information about submitting issues and collecting bounties for responsibly reporting valid security issues.

Searching

Parameters

• JIRA searching is easy once you know a bit about the parameters you may use.
• For instructions on searching in JIRA, please visit JIRA query syntax and JIRA quick search.

Perform a search

• First, click on the "Find Issues" link at the top of the screen.
• Next, enter the parameters you wish to search for in the search pane on the left-hand side of the screen.
• As an example, if I wish to search for issues that have not been resolved containing the word "avatar", I would choose the following parameters:
  • Project = all projects
  • Text search = avatar
  • Resolutions = Unresolved
• Another sample search would be for any issues that are fixed in the last week in a particular project. For example, I want to find all bugs in the Second Life Viewer project that were resolved between February 1, 2007 and February 14, 2007. I would enter the following parameters:
  • (Optional: Click the "New" link in the search pane to clear settings from any previous searches)
  • Project = Second Life Viewer
  • Resolution = Fixed
  • Updated After = January 31, 2007
  • Updated Before = February 15, 2007

Saving a search as a Filter

• A search filter is a saved search that you may share with others.
• After performing a search as described above, you may save it as a filter by clicking the "Save" link in the Search pane.
• Name the filter something meaningful, for example "Unresolved avatar bugs in all projects."
• Now you can access the search and run it at any time by clicking the "Filter" link in the top right-hand side of the page. This saves time and effort, especially if you frequently run the same complex search and want a handy shortcut!

Reporting an issue in JIRA

To report a new feature, or a bug or problem encountered while using Second Life Open Source Viewer or the Second Life Service itself, please log in to jira.secondlife.com.

Determine if the issue has already been submitted

Upon login to JIRA, you will land on the Home page. Here you have access to some global filters which give you access to the most up-to-date information on submitted issues. The preset filters include all unresolved (unfixed or untested) issues within each project. Of course you may create and save your own filters at any time, or simply run a new search. Either way, it is best practice to search for issues you wish to report in several ways before submitting them!

If the issue already was submitted, feel free to leave a comment containing supporting information, or if it's a bug, possibly another reproduction for the QA team. The more information we have about a specific issue, the higher chance of a resolution.

It can't be emphasized enough that searching for existing issues before filing a new one is the most important step in the submission process. Issues submitted more than once take time and effort to find and categorize -- and that is time our team could be spending testing issues and fixing problems instead. The same is true for new features already proposed by other Residents, because duplicates dilute votes, making them less effective.

Read the QA Bug Submission Guidelines

Before you submit a bug, be sure you are familiar with our QA Bug Submission Guidelines. Following them ensures our QA team's ability to reproduce the issue and transfer it to our internal tracking system for resolution by the Linden Lab Development Team!

Submitting a bug

• To create a new bug in JIRA, do the following:
  • Click the "Create New Issue" link in the blue navigation bar towards the top of the screen.
  • Select a project that most closely describes the kind of bug you are submitting
  • Select "Bug" as your "Issue Type".
  • Enter a concise yet descriptive summary of the issue
    • Be careful to omit Resident names or other personally-identifying information if it can be avoided!
  • Select a component that narrows the scope of the bug
  • Describe the environment in which the problem occurs
    • For example, "Only happens with Mac OS X 10.4.1," or "Seen only with NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 card," etc.
  • Enter a detailed description of the issue:
    • Steps to reproduce the bug (how to make the bug happen)
    • Observed results (what happens when the bug occurs)
    • Expected results (what behavior you would have expected instead)
    • Again, be as detailed as possible without including personal information!
  • Finally, click "Create" to create a new bug

Submitting a new feature

The process is similar to submitting a bug, with the following differences:

• You select "New Feature" instead of "Bug" as your "Issue Type".
• Instead of a "reproduction", clearly describe what the desired implementation and functionality of this new feature is. Make sure it hasn't already been done — you can refer to release notes for historical context and read our blog to learn more about what we're doing next.

For both bugs and new features, feel free to include links to other relevant info for an issue, such as forum and blog posts.

Voting for issues

You can vote for new features and bugs that you wish to see resolved, and view all issues by # of votes. JIRA uses approval voting, so you can vote for as many (or few) issues as you'd like, and you get 1 vote per issue.

Votes can readily be used as part of our prioritization process. Note that since we need to look at aspects such as feasibility and the time required for implementation, a highly-voted issue isn't necessarily going to be resolved ahead of a lesser-voted, but more doable one.

Return to check on issue status

Linden Lab will review issues submitted to jira.secondlife.com on a regular basis. The engineering team may require additional information from the issue reporter, or other contributors, so reviewing all of your created/commented issues regularly will be useful while email support in JIRA is disabled.

Also, when issues are resolved internally the external site will be updated as well, so check your issues for changes on a regular basis.

Issue States

Here is how Linden Lab is using the resolutions:

• Open - This is an issue that belongs to the Assignee to resolve. The assignee may fix the issue, or kick the issue back to the reporter by marking it "resolved" (see below)
• In progress - This is how a developer signals to everyone that he/she is working on the issue.
• Reopened - same as "Open".
• Resolved - This is an implicit assignment back to the reporter of the issue. It is not closed yet, but rather in a state of limbo that depends on the resolution. It's up to the Reporter to decide whether to reopen an issue, or close it.
  • Fixed - means that the bug is fixed in some version of the code that will eventually be generally available.
  • Won't Fix - means that the assignee doesn't believe this issue should ever be fixed.
  • Duplicate - means that there's some other issue that describes the same problem/idea.
  • Incomplete - this issue lacks information
  • Cannot Reproduce - we plan to apply this label pretty liberally. Please provide a detailed description of how to reproduce a problem. Issues that can't be reproduced will eventually be closed.
  • Misfiled - this issue doesn't belong in this issue tracker. Please file the issue elsewhere.
• Closed - The final resting place.