It's always worth taking a quick look at the recently submitted issues and reading recent posts on the forum to see if others have encountered the issue.

If you aren't sure it's a bug, then you should ask on the forum first; members of the development team, or other community members will review the issue, and ask you to submit it if they think it is necessary.

Make it easy for the developers to reproduce the bug

Often you will be asked to submit an example which can be used to reproduce the bug; but even if you aren't, it's still helpful to do so!

The best way to do this is to create a new skeleton project using seam-gen. You can then add any classes and files needed to reproduce. Remove the lib/ directory, run ant clean, zip up the result, and attach this zip to the issue in JIRA. Why do we ask you to use seam-gen? Well, all the seam developers understand the build scripts and archive structure seam-gen produces, so it means we don't have to take time to understand your custom build script.

Remember, the developers won't have access to your database or most likely to your database software, so make sure to use hsql, and use import.sql to include any sample data needed. If you create an example using another database or that expects to connect to another database, your issue will be ignored or rejected.

Write a test case

If you are feeling super nice, you can write a test case which shows the issue, and submit it as a patch into the seam unit test suite or integration test suite.

Write a patch

Even better, you know how to fix the bug, and you decide to write a patch! Take a look at the guidelines for developing Seam. Even if you write a patch its often necessary to attach an example to allow us to reproduce, as the developer who reviews your patch will want to properly understand the issue.

Created: 04. Oct 2008, 16:16 CET (Pete Muir)