20 Oct 2016

Community Week: QA – get involved

Posted in Community, QA By Mike Saunders On October 20, 2016

LibreOffice Community Weeks

Earlier this week we talked to LibreOffice’s quality assurance (QA) engineer, Xisco Fauli, about how the QA team works, what they’re involved with at the moment, and where they need help. Let’s now look at how regular LibreOffice users can get involved: even if you can only spare a little bit of time each week, you can really make a difference to strengthen and improve the software.

LibreOffice’s QA team is comprised largely of volunteers. The team works through bug reports submitted by LibreOffice users, checking them for accuracy, reproducing them (where possible), and assigning them to the appropriate developers or projects.

Reporting bugs

Bugzilla is used for tracking bugs, and it’s a very versatile tool that may look a bit daunting initially. But once you’ve submitted a couple of bug reports it becomes easier to work with. To submit a bug report, you need to be logged in there – so click “New Account” at the top to set up an account.

Now, let’s say you’ve found a bug in LibreOffice and want to report it. The process goes as follows:

  1. Click New at the top of Bugzilla, choose LibreOffice, and you’ll end up on this page
  2. Many bugs have been reported multiple times already, so scan through the list to check your issue isn’t already being dealt with
  3. Also, try typing some keywords associated with your bug (eg “docx import” or “PDF crash” in the box under the list, and click “Find Similar Issues” to check if someone else has submitted the bug already
  4. Otherwise, click “My issue is not listed” and fill in the form
  5. Provide as much information as possible: the component of LibreOffice affected (eg Calc), what hardware you’re using, and LibreOffice version
  6. Provide a short summary and detailed description with as much useful information as possible
  7. Add steps to reproduce, the results you get, and what you expected
  8. For the “severity” part, only choose a high ranking if it’s extremely serious (like, it can cause major data loss

Once your bug has been submitted, a member of the QA team will check it and ask for more information if required. Also see this page for more information on submitting good bug reports.

Confirming and triaging

But what happens if you bug has already been reported? It still helps the QA team if you confirm it as well, especially if you’re using a different operating system or version of LibreOffice. In that way, the QA team can narrow down the cause more quickly. So it’s worth taking the time to confirm even if a bug report from someone else already looks detailed enough.

If you’d like to get more involved in the QA team, maybe to build up experience for a future career in QA, you can help by triaging bugs. This is the process of confirming and prioritising bugs so that developers know what to work on. As it’s a large and complex piece of software used by tens of millions of people, LibreOffice receives many bug reports, so it’s important that they are organised correctly.

Then there are Easy Hacks you can help with, which help the QA processes and team. These vary from improving the QA infrastructure to more creative topics like making a video to assist newcomers. Have a look at the page – something is bound to take your interest!

 

Join the Bug Hunting Session

On Friday October 21, from 08:00 UTC to 22:UTC, a big testing effort to fix bugs in the upcoming LibreOffice 5.3.0 release will take place. There are many new features in this next version of LibreOffice, so your assistance in making it rock-solid is very much appreciated. Here’s how to get involved:

See the wiki for more information on the Bug Hunting Session – and thanks in advance for any help you give. Millions of LibreOffice users around the world will benefit from your efforts, and free and open source software on the desktop will keep getting stronger!

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