Community Week: QA – meet the team

Having covered development and documentation, we’re now into our third LibreOffice Community Week: Quality Assurance (or just “QA” for short). QA is an essential element of the LibreOffice development process, and affects the suite in many ways. For the benefit of end users, QA helps to identify and fix bugs – whether they’re glitches in the behaviour of the office suite, or problems that arise when importing certain files, or just issues with the user interface.

But QA is an integral part of new feature development as well. When a LibreOffice developer adds something new to the office suite, QA processes ensure that it doesn’t impact other features, and that the rest of the software continues to be stable and robust.

LibreOffice has an active QA community that works on tracking, reproducing and fixing bugs, and The Document Foundation (the non-profit entity that backs LibreOffice development) recently hired a dedicated QA engineer, Xisco Fauli. We caught up with him to see how the QA process works and how newcomers can help out.

What is your role in the QA team?

My role is to act as a middle-man between the QA community and other teams, such as participating in the Engineering Steering Committee (ESC) meetings for instance.

I’m also in charge of organizing the QA meetings, which take place every other Tuesday, and organizing the bug hunting sessions, the next one being on Friday October 21 for LibreOffice 5.3 Alpha. I also spend time maintaining Bugzilla, our bug-tracking tool, updating the wiki, helping other users on IRC, and triaging and reporting bugs. Lately I’ve been working on collecting stats from Bugzilla so that they’ll help us to analyze the status of bugs and users in the platform.

How did you get involved?

I started working for The Document Foundation just one and a half months ago, in the beginning of September, so I’m a newbie here. However, I had already contributed to the LibreOffice project in the past, mostly doing bibisections in QA or working on Easy Hacks and small fixes in development. Besides, I participated in the Google Summer of Code in 2011, converting some Java wizards to Python.

What does your typical workday look like?

So far I think no two days have been alike for me, so I’ll try to summarize it as much as possible! Normally, the first thing I do when I get connected is check the email and the IRC history. Then I take a look at the new changes in Bugzilla (new unconfirmed bugs, new bibisectRequest bugs, etc.) and eventually I work on the main task I have planned for the day. In case I have a meeting, I also spend some time getting things ready beforehand.

What areas in QA are working well, and what needs to be improved?

Definitely the best part of QA is the volunteers themselves, who expend their own time on the project, keeping the unconfirmed bugs low, triaging bugs, providing backtraces, etc. as this would be impossible without them.

I also find tools like the bibisect repositories really great for triaging regressions. On the other hand, as the amount of bugs in Bugzilla is quite high, I believe we need to improve how duplicated bugs can be identified more easily, as well as finding ways of attracting new volunteers to the team and encouraging them to stay in the project.

How can normal (non-developer) LibreOffice users help out?

One of the best ways a normal day-to-day Libreoffice user can help out is by reporting clear and detailed bugs when they find a problem, making the chances of getting the bug triaged, and subsequently fixed, much higher. A good bug report must have:

• Operating system and LibreOffice version
• Enumerated reproducible steps
• Simple attachments where appropriate
• Observed or expected results

Besides, they can also help to confirm bugs or retest bugs that might be fixed.

Finally, participating in the next Bug Hunting Session on Friday October 21 is a good way to start helping out. Newcomers can contact us on IRC (#libreoffice-qa on Freenode) or via the mailing list if they have any questions.

Thanks Xisco. So, that’s an overview of the QA team and what it does – later this week we’ll show you exactly how to get involved, confirm a bug report, and help to make LibreOffice stronger and more robust for everyone.