Bug Reports and Feature Requests FAQ

Preface

Lately we've been getting a lot of bug reports and feature requests.

While this is great and in general we like bug reports a lot there is always a high risk of some report or detail being lost in the noise when posted on a forum or sent through e-mail. People sometimes forget...

For this reason, we would like to ask you to post bug reports if you have even the slightest doubt that something is not working as it should.

The same goes for feature requests: if you have a good idea, why not share it with others AND put it on the developers TODO list.

If you think that somehow we will probably not implement it anyway, look at the change history. Bugs do get solved.

The links to click...

To file a bug report or a change request go here, create an id and use the "Create" button on to make a new one: http://jira.pentaho.org/browse/PDI

To see a list of the open bugs/feature requests in the latest development version, look at the Road Map or Change Log.

Due to the high number of cases, a search by the Issue Navigator might be more efficient.

What to put in a bug report?

In general, the rule is that the easier it is for us to find or reproduce the bug, the faster it gets fixed. Use your common sense, but in general it's always nice to have as many of the following as possible:

a short but complete description of the problem
a stack trace if any is available. From version 2.4.0 on, you need to click on the "Details" button in the error dialogs.
a version number of PDI, the build number & data are also nice. Use "pan -version" to obtain this information.
sometimes a small transformation to show the problem can be really helpful, consider attaching it to the bug report.
consider attaching a sample of the input file you used
select an appropriate component (most times 'Step' or 'Job Entry') and eventually a label, please see: JIRA PDI Components, Sub-components and Labels

What to put in a change request?

We always favor those change requests that have a clear and urgent use-case. If there are certain things that you need Pentaho Data Integration to do, explain this to us as clearly as possible in the change request. Something may be a lot of work, but we still might favorthat particular feature request over any others because you convinced us it was more important.

A word of thanks

Pentaho Data Integration is advancing very fast at the moment, this is mainly possible because of the large group of users, testers and bug reporters.

Thank you for your continued support and for your help in making "Kettle" a world class data integration tool. Reporting bugs and filing feature requests really pushes PDI forward.