The bug squad takies care of the 1.5 release which is now in maintenance mode. That means getting the 1.5.1, 1.5.2, 1.5.3, 1.5.4  etc releases ready by fixing problems that come up. The idea is to make the release increasingly stable and take care of issues that come up. At the same time, it is vitally important not to break anything that is working. That's called software regression and it's not something you want at this stage.

In the 1.5 tracker there are several common statuses, mainly: open, confirmed, pending, ready to commit.

• Open means it's reported, but it hasn't been determined for sure whether it is a real bug or a feature request ort a mistake made by a user. This can take a long time to determine, and it is important for some one reporting an issue to respond to questions the squad asks. At this point many of the new issues are related to very specific server related issues.
• Once it is decided it's an issue that can be addressed, it goes to Confirmed. That's when the JBS tries to solve it or consults with the development team about a solution.
• Once there is a proposed solution that someone is pretty confident about, a patch is created  and attached to the report. The status is switched to pending.
• In pending, people test the solution. The JBS tries to have a few different people test in different environments (versions of PHP, IIS veruse Linux etc., various browsers). The number of testers depends on how complicated the issue is, basically, but also on how likely it is to break something.
• Then when it has been tested and is okay, it goes to ready to commit, which is when one of the commiters does a really careful review and if all is okay commits the patch.

You don't need to be a member of the jbs to help clear up Joomla! bugs.

Iif you want to help with bug squashing, jump into the tracker where you want, you can do the open ones and try to confirm, or the confirmed ones and try to fix, or you can test the pendings.

To report about what you have done, login to joomlacode and add a comment. 

 You'll be amazed at how much impact you can have and how good it feels to contribute to the Joomla! project.