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JDK6 Regressions Challenge


THANK YOU!!!!!

NOTE: The contest is now closed


We are pleased to announce the winners of the JDK6 Regressions Challenge.  From January 30 through March 31, 2006, we sponsored a challenge asking the public to test JDK6 and tell us about any regression bugs that were found.  The specifics can be found further down this page.  There are five winners in this contest, each of which are receiving an Ultra 20 workstation.

During the course of the contest we received over 130 submissions, of which 72 passed the screening process and were entered as regression bugs.  We wish to thank everybody who participated.  The contest gave us some very valuable information and feedback to use in improving Java quality.

After careful consideration a team of our senior staff selected the following entries as the winners in this contest.   The criteria we used included the clarity of the bug report and the impact of the bug.

As you can see from this list of winners, we had worldwide participation.  A truly global effort!

Bug ID Contestant name and country Synopsis
6384064 Jason Mehrens, Davenport, Iowa, United States SynchronousQueue put/take interrupt handling differs from timed poll
6406177 Sebastian Mueller, Bad Mergentheim, Germany Graphics2D drawText often does not draw String completely
6384552 Oh Rai, Ichikawa, Chiba Ken, Japan unknown window is created when the height of menu list is longer tha
6389875 Alexander Grzesik, Berlin, Germany Mustang Crashes with image double buffering, drawRect
6385299 Yoseph Phillips, Jerusalem, Israel Problems with Hebrew (he) Resource Bundles

Additionally we would like to highlight the following entries as honorable mentions.  We had so many good entries, it was hard to pick just five.

Bug ID Contestant name and country Synopsis
6404008 Martin Schmid, Thun, Switzerland Mouse dragged events obey drag sensitivity 
6406264 Todd Viegut, Minneapolis, Minnesota Custom combo box calendar popup no longer functional
6389729 Oh Rai, Ichikawa, Chiba Ken, Japan GraphicsEnvironment.getAvailableFontFamilyNames misses fonts with localised names on XP
6406018 Thomas Hawtin, Totnes, Devon, United Kingdom Assertion failure in javax.swing.TransferHandler$TransferSupport.set
6384461 Manabu Nakamura, Hiroshima, Japan The title bar and task bar icons differ for SWT applications

The contest is now closed

The JDK6 Regressions Challenge officially ended on March 31, 2006. We received a total of 68 submissions which were validated as regressions by our evaluation team. These have been entered into Sun's bug tracking system, and are considered very high priority bugs to be fixed prior to Java SE 6 shipping for general availability. Want to follow the progress of these bugs in getting fixed? Its easy - just visit the contest status page for ongoing updates. Thank you to everyone who submitted entries! Every regression that the community discovers now is a regression that won't be in the final shipping product.

Even though the contest is over, the Beta test phase continues for Java SE 6. Sun and the Java technology community remain very interested in any regressions you discover in snapshot releases or the Beta release. So please - keep testing and reporting any problems you find at bug submission URL.

Be sure to come back to this page to find out who are the winners, and thanks again for your participation!

What is a Regression?

Java SE 6 is rounding the bend and coming to the home stretch! Sun's engineers along with the JDK Community have been working hard to complete the feature implementations for the new JSRs to be included in Java SE 6. This release is about to enter the Beta test phase, and will undergo many months of rigorous testing to ensure that it is stable and  compatible, and delivers the performance and ease of development that customers and developers have come to expect from the Java SE platform.

One of the most critical elements of this testing is the hunt for "regressions" - bugs in the version to version compatibility of Java SE. A regression is an implementation problem in which a properly written Java application that uses the Java APIs in their intended manner works just fine under a released version of Java SE, but does not work correctly under the newer version under test. Sun's Java SE software quality assurance team tests for regressions continuously, as these are some of the most critical bugs impacting customers and developers, and are one of the major sources of incompatibilities between versions that can necessitate expensive re-qualification of applications on specific versions of the platform. But no matter how intensively Sun tests, we can't test every application in every potential configuration, or more than a tiny subset of the API usage combinations and environments possible with such a broadly useful platform. That is where the community can help!

The prizes!

Every verified regression submitted by March 31, 2006 earned the submitter a T-shirt (while supplies last) in appreciation of your valued contribution to Java SE 6. And thats not all! The best five regressions submitted, as judged by Sun's Java engineering and quality assurance teams, will receive a brand new Ultra 20 workstation from Sun featuring a blazing fast AMD Opteron processor! This dream development system is our fastest Ultra 20 workstation, including a Model 152 2.6 GHz processor, 2 GB of memory, and an NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400 3D graphics accelerator, and comes with the award winning Solaris 10 operating system installed. This workstation is fully compatible with leading Linux distributions as well as Windows XP, 64-bit Edition.

We are very eager to address the regressions that are submitted for this contest, and any others we find as part of Beta testing. We plan to fix as many regressions as possible, however we can't promise that every one will be fixed prior to Java SE 6 general availability. What we can promise, is that we will decide on how to address the regressions we receive based on maximizing the overall quality and stability of Java SE 6. We will be assessing the impact and risk of every fix going into JDK6 from this point on. Some regressions may be too risky to fix in the first release, or have limited practical impact and not be worth any potential destabilization. We may fix some regressions in subsequent updates as well. If, for some reason, we address a regression entry by not fixing it, we will definitely explain why.


Here are some additional resources that we hope will answer your questions and give you additional opportunities to participate and interact with your peers in the JDK Community and with Sun's Java engineering team:
  • The Official Rules.
  • An FAQ page that we'll keep updated as new questions come in.
  • A status page where you can see all of the validated regressions submitted for the contest. This is where you can look to see if your proposed entry might be a duplicate of an already submitted regression.
  • A forum where you can post questions and comments and discuss the contest.
  • The J2SE 5.0, Update 6 JDK binary download page on java.sun.com, where you can get the reference released platform version for the contest.
  • The Java SE 6 binary snapshot download page where you can get the latest JDK6 snapshot on which to test your regression contest entry.
  • More about the Ultra 20 systems.
  • The standard bug submission page where you can submit problems that you identify that are not eligible, either because they're not regressions or because of another reason