How to Report a Bug

Owned by BradleyW (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jul 22, 2024 by Bailey-Grace Harrell
3 min read

(If you want to make a feature request, follow the instructions in How to Request a New Feature)

The ArchivesSpace team encourages all users of the ArchivesSpace application to report any bugs encountered during use of the application. 


Before reporting a bug

  • determine that the bug has not already been fixed by either
    • updating to the latest release and attempt to replicate the problem in it, or
    • attempt to replicate the problem on our sandbox (which always has the latest release running)
  • review the unresolved bugs logged in JIRA (you do not need to be logged-in or have an account) to see if the bug has already been reported, in which case you can indicate in the existing report that you also encountered the bug instead of creating a new ticket.
    • after creating a JIRA account, you can vote and add yourself as a watcher of an already existing Bug Report by clicking the buttons on the top right view of the JIRA issue: 
      • Voting for a Bug Report can help prioritizing it.
      • Watching a Bug Report will send you an email when information is added to the issue or its status changes. 
  • if desirable, you can also post a message to the ArchivesSpace Users Group list, asking for help in understanding and verifying the bug you encountered. To post to the list you will need to be staff of an ArchivesSpace member organization.

Once you have determined the bug has not been previously reported

  1. Log in to your Jira account (You will need to create a JIRA account to submit a ticket)
  2. Access JIRA  and select Create issue (Select ArchivesSpace New Workflow as the project).

An actionable bug report requires the following:

  1. Issue Type identified as “Bug”

  2. Summary description of the problem encountered. It should be a short and specific title of the issue. (Example: Wrap and tag editor does not work)

  3. A detailed description of the issue.  This includes:

    1. Steps to reproduce: describe the steps leading up to the problem. Keep each step simple, specific and unambiguous. Include relevant URLs and prefer using a noun to a pronoun.  

      Include relevant URLs or relative paths

      For example instead of formulating a step as: Navigate to the top containers configuration, prefer including the URL or the relative path (the url without the domain name part) as it appears in the address bar of your web browser: Navigate to the top containers configuration: "/staff/top_containers"

      Prefer using nouns to pronouns
      For example instead of: It does not include the resource ids a step could be less ambiguous as: The EAD export does not include the resource ids
      Complete Example:
      Edit a resource on Staff User Interface by browsing ''/staff/resources/<resource id>/edit"
      Mark an agent link as "primary" by clicking the respective "Make primary" button.
      Save the resource
      Click on Export → Download MARCXML

    2. Expected Results versus the Actual Results: explain what you expected to happen and what actually happened.

      Example:
      Expected result: ”An 1xx field should appear in the MARCXML export of the resource”
      Actual result: "No 1xx field appears in the in MARCXML export of the resource"

    3. Visual proof, screenshots, screencasts or other documents

      Note:
      It is helpful to take a screenshot or a screencast of the whole browser where the URL of the viewed page and all the relevant context is visible. Seeing just       a button that has a wrong label does not help as it does not show where in the UI the button appears and in what context.

      It is highly encouraged to include other relevant documents, such as an an excel file that causes an error while being imported.

  4. Assign a priority according to the severity of the issue.  The rankings range from the trivial (lowest) to blocker (most severe).

  5. Whenever possible, please assign relevant labels.  Example: accessibility, digital_objects, agents, etc.

  6. Indicated the affected version. Affected version/s is the version of the ArchivesSpace application in which the problem was encountered.

Note: The other data fields will be used internally by the ArchivesSpace program team and can be disregarded.

Upon submission of the ticket, the program team will contact the submitter and all other commenters directly via the ticket.  

Ticket submitters are encouraged to remain vigilant of their ticket and respond to all responses from the program team in order for the issue to be addressed in a timely manner.