Zarro boogs

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Zarro boogs is a facetious metastatement about the state of software in development. Bug trackers, used to monitor the state of problems with a software project, readily describe how many bugs are outstanding. The response "zarro boogs" is a buggy statement about the absence of bugs.

Embedded in the Bugzilla source code (where the calculation to go out to the database and select rows that match a query is) there is an exception for a count of zero defects being returned. Instead of it printing "0 bugs found", which would be expected based on every other case, it prints the statement "zarro boogs found" if the count returned is zero. The only other exception is for a return count of one for grammatical correctness ("1 bug found"). They provide this comment also in the source code to developers who are dumbfounded by their bizarre exception handling programming:

Zarro Boogs Found

This is just a goofy way of saying that there were no bugs found matching your query. When asked to explain this message, Terry Weissman (an early Bugzilla developer) had the following to say:

I've been asked to explain this ... way back when, when Netscape released version 4.0 of its browser, we had a release party. Naturally, there had been a big push to try and fix every known bug before the release. Naturally, that hadn't actually happened. (This is not unique to Netscape or to 4.0; the same thing has happened with every software project I've ever seen.) Anyway, at the release party, T-shirts were handed out that said something like "Netscape 4.0: Zarro Boogs". Just like the software, the T-shirt had no known bugs. Uh-huh. So, when you query for a list of bugs, and it gets no results, you can think of this as a friendly reminder. Of *course* there are bugs matching your query, they just aren't in the bugsystem yet...

--Terry Weissman

From The Bugzilla Guide - 2.16.10 Release: Glossary