# Stash Latest : Bug fixing policy

This page last changed on Mar 04, 2012 by pwatson.

### Summary

- Atlassian Support will help with workarounds and bug reporting.
- Critical bugs will generally be fixed in the next maintenance release.
- Non critical bugs will be scheduled according to a variety of considerations.

### Raising a Bug Report

Atlassian Support is eager and happy to help verify bugs — we take pride in it! Please open a support request in our support system providing as much information as possible about how to replicate the problem you are experiencing. We will replicate the bug to verify, then lodge the report for you. We'll also try to construct workarounds if they're possible.

Customers and plugin developers are also welcome to open bug reports on our issue tracking systems directly. Use http://jira.atlassian.com for the stand-alone products and http://studio.atlassian.com for JIRA Studio and Atlassian OnDemand.

When raising a new bug, you should rate the priority of a bug according to our JIRA usage guidelines. Customers should watch a filed bug in order to receive e-mail notification when a "Fix Version" is scheduled for release.

### How Atlassian Approaches Bug Fixing

Maintenance (bug fix) releases come out more frequently than major releases and attempt to target the most critical bugs affecting our customers. The notation for a maintenance release is the final number in the version (ie the 1 in 3.0.1).

If a bug is critical (production application down or major malfunction causing business revenue loss or high numbers of staff unable to perform their normal functions) then it will be fixed in the next maintenance release provided that:

- The fix is technically feasible (i.e. it doesn't require a major architectural change).
- It does not impact the quality or integrity of a product.

For non-critical bugs, the developer assigned to fixing bugs prioritises the non-critical bug according to these factors:

- How many of our supported configurations are affected by the problem.
- Whether there is an effective workaround or patch.
- How difficult the issue is to fix.
- Whether many bugs in one area can be fixed at one time.

The developers responsible for bug fixing also monitor comments on existing bugs and new bugs submitted in JIRA, so you can provide feedback in this way. We give high priority consideration to security issues.

When considering the priority of a non-critical bug we try to determine a 'value' score for a bug which takes into account the severity of the bug from the customer's perspective, how prevalent the bug is and whether roadmap features may render the bug obsolete. We combine this with a complexity score (i.e. how difficult the bug is). These two dimensions are used when developers self serve from the bug pile.

### Further reading

See Atlassian Support Offerings for more support-related information.