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LibreOffice Quality Assurance: six months in statistics (part 2)

This is the second part in our blog series about the LibreOffice QA (quality assurance) community – see here for the first part.

Regressions

During the six month period from 23 November 2016 to 21 May 2017, 553 bugs were identified as regressions by 61 people. This means a feature behaved correctly in the past – but a change in the code made it work incorrectly. This is an expected problem in any software project, especially when many changes to the code are done every day. For that reason it’s very important to determine whether a bug is a regression or not – and to identify regressions as soon as possible to maintain the quality of the software.

It’s also important to mention the tremendous amount of effort developers spend on adding new unit tests in order to avoid regressions from being introduced again. More information about that here.

Top 15 regression identifiers:

  1. Xisco Faulí (190)
  2. Buovjaga (81)
  3. Telesto (50)
  4. Áron Budea (35)
  5. Alex Thurgood (32)
  6. Justin L (11)
  7. Cor Nouws (11)
  8. tommy27 (11)
  9. Julien Nabet (9)
  10. Yousuf Philips (jay) (9)
  11. m.a.riosv (9)
  12. V Stuart Foote (7)
  13. Kevin Suo (6)
  14. Luke (6)
  15. Jacques Guilleron (6)

These are the statuses of the bugs identified as regressions:

More than half of these bugs have been RESOLVED (243), or resolved and VERIFIED (57) – 54.2% to be exact.

Bisected

Once we identify that a bug is a regression, we can use a tool called bibisect to identify at which point the regression was introduced, allowing us to speed up the process of fixing the bug.

During the last 6 months, 346 bugs have been bisected by 14 people.

Top 14 ‘bisecters’:

  1. Xisco Faulí (186)
  2. Áron Budea (77)
  3. raal (50)
  4. Justin L (10)
  5. Terrence Enger (6)
  6. Michael Stahl (4)
  7. Mike Kaganski (4)
  8. Miklos Vajna (3)
  9. Buovjaga (1)
  10. Kevin Suo (1)
  11. Luke (1)
  12. Jean-Baptiste Faure (1)
  13. Caolán McNamara (1)
  14. Katarina Behrens (1)

And these are the statuses of the bugs bisected:

Of the bisected bugs, 55.7% are either RESOLVED (148), or resolved and VERIFIED (45).

Backtraces

Another way to accelerate the fixing process is by providing a debug trace when there’s a crash, slowness or a freeze in the software.

During the last 6 months, a debug trace has been added to 140 bugs by 14 people.

Top 13 debug trace providers:

  1. Julien Nabet (48)
  2. Xisco Faulí (35)
  3. Buovjaga (28)
  4. fiftyigfuci_f_mi (10)
  5. Alex Thurgood (6)
  6. V Stuart Foote (4)
  7. Áron Budea (4)
  8. Telesto (3)
  9. Terrence Enger (3)
  10. Yousuf Philips (jay) (2)
  11. JoNi (2)
  12. Kevin Suo (1)
  13. Cor Nouws (1)

These are the statuses of the bugs with a debug trace:

More than two-thirds of these bugs have been RESOLVED (74), or resolved and VERIFIED (22) – 69.4% to be exact.

Duplicate bugs

Knowing that many bugs are reported everyday, it’s important to identify if a certain bug was reported previously and therefore whether it’s a duplicate or has never been reported before.
During the last six months, 757 bugs have been identified as duplicates by 91 people.

Top 20 duplicate identifiers:

  1. Xisco Faulí (142)
  2. Buovjaga (116)
  3. V Stuart Foote (79)
  4. Áron Budea (40)
  5. Telesto (31)
  6. Alex Thurgood (28)
  7. m.a.riosv (27)
  8. Julien Nabet (26)
  9. Heiko Tietze (20)
  10. Timur (19)
  11. Khaled Hosny (18)
  12. Yousuf Philips (jay) (15)
  13. Maxim Monastirsky (14)
  14. Adolfo Jayme (13)
  15. Gábor Kelemen (11)
  16. Mike Kaganski (10)
  17. Cor Nouws (10)
  18. Jacques Guilleron (8)
  19. Bartosz (8)
  20. Regina Henschel (6)

Resolved bugs

The cornerstone of the project is its development work. During the six month period, 955 bugs were set to RESOLVED FIXED by 147 people.

Top 20 fixers:

  1. Caolán McNamara (73)
  2. Miklos Vajna (53)
  3. Eike Rathke (41)
  4. Michael Stahl (39)
  5. Julien Nabet (38)
  6. Justin L (36)
  7. Adolfo Jayme (33)
  8. Heiko Tietze (29)
  9. Samuel Mehrbrodt (29)
  10. Xisco Faulí (26)
  11. Gábor Kelemen (25)
  12. Yousuf Philips (jay) (23)
  13. Maxim Monastirsky (22)
  14. Markus Mohrhard (22)
  15. V Stuart Foote (19)
  16. Zolnai Tamás (18)
  17. Mike Kaganski (18)
  18. Katarina Behrens (17)
  19. Khaled Hosny (16)
  20. Winfried Donkers (15)

Verified fixed bugs

Finally, once a bug has been fixed, it’s important to verify that it has indeed been fixed.

During the last six months, 212 fixes have been verified by 28 people.

Top 15 verifiers:

  1. Justin L (65)
  2. Xisco Faulí (24)
  3. Buovjaga (18)
  4. Timur (16)
  5. m.a.riosv (11)
  6. Julien Nabet (9)
  7. Heiko Tietze (7)
  8. Terrence Enger (7)
  9. Jean-Baptiste Faure (7)
  10. Thomas Lendo (6)
  11. Áron Budea (6)
  12. raal (4)
  13. Yousuf Philips (jay) (4)
  14. Cor Nouws (4)
  15. V Stuart Foote (3)
  16. Kevin Suo (3)
  17. Luke (3)
  18. Jacques Guilleron (3)
  19. Zineta (2)
  20. Alex Arnaud (2)

Get Involved!

So, you’ve seen what the QA team is doing across the LibreOffice project – why not get involved and help out? Even if you only have half an hour of spare time each week, by confirming bugs (and fixes) you can make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world. And in addition, you build up valuable experience working with a large project and open source community – which could be very useful for a future career! Discover more about the QA team in our video interview with QA engineer Xisco Fauli.

(Notes about this blog post: raw data can be checked here. For more stats, visit the stats page in the QA wiki.)

Month of LibreOffice, May 2017: The results!

So the Month of LibreOffice, May 2017 has come to a close. We’ve had awesome contributions all across the project, from code patches and bug report confirmations, through to translations and user support. Here’s how many stickers have been awarded:

Click the number for the full details. And then, if you see your name (or username) on that page, claim your sticker! Yes, you can get a cool sticker for your laptop or other devices. Simply email mike.saunders@documentfoundation.org with your name (or username) from the wiki page, along with your postal address, and we’ll send you a sticker in the next couple of weeks. It’ll look like this:

(Note that your postal address will only be used for posting the sticker to you, and not be stored afterwards or used otherwise.) Enjoy showing off your sticker, and thanks again for your contribution!

Behind the scenes

Meanwhile, let’s reflect on the past month. This graph shows how the number of awarded stickers grew over the 31 days of May:

While there was a big jump at the start as new names were added, it was good to see a steady stream of additional LibreOffice contributors over the month. There were no really “quiet” periods – we were monitoring code patches, bug report confirmations, translations, documentation contributions and user support (on Ask LibreOffice), and every day we added new people to the stickers list. This reflects on a healthy and lively project and community, so long may it continue!

And a final word: when you look at the “Contributing code patches” section of the stickers page, note that these are community contributions, on top of the daily work done by paid LibreOffice developers. It’s great to see so many people getting involved, exploring the source code and working on Easy Hacks.

We’ll be running another Month of LibreOffice later in the year – but you can get involved at any time. Join our friendly community, help make LibreOffice even better, and we look forward to your contributions!

LibreOffice Quality Assurance: six months in statistics (part 1)

During the last six months (from 23 November 2016 to 21 May 2017), many things have happened in LibreOffice and in Bugzilla, its bug tracker, where bugs are reported by users, triaged by the quality assurance (QA) team and finally handled by developers, if needed.

New bugs

During this time, 3664 bugs were reported by 1621 users, of which 425 are tagged as enhancement requests.

Top 15 reporters:

  1. Telesto (285)
  2. Yousuf Philips (jay) (103)
  3. Xisco Faulí (97)
  4. Regina Henschel (61)
  5. Thomas Lendo (60)
  6. Áron Budea (51)
  7. Volga (45)
  8. Gábor Kelemen (44)
  9. Samuel Mehrbrodt (42)
  10. Heiko Tietze (31)
  11. andreas_k (28)
  12. Cor Nouws (27)
  13. Miklos Vajna (25)
  14. Mike Kaganski (25)
  15. Timur (23)

The following chart shows the total number of bugs reported each week during this period, week 48 of 2016 being the week with the highest number of bug reports (185) and week 52 with the lowest (94) – and with week 52 being the last week of the year, this comes as no surprise:

Writer (1168) is the component with the most bug reports, followed by Calc (647), LibreOffice in general (495), Impress (284) and the user interface (UI) (253):

Most of these bugs are reported for all operating systems (2194). However, some are specific to Windows (791), Linux (518) or macOS (142). This is an important part of the triage process, as it’s fundamental to determine whether a bug affects all operating systems or just some of them.

The same happens with the CPU architectures. Most of these bugs affect all architectures (2725), while some affect only x64 (790) or x86 (140) computers:

Onto bug statuses: freshly reported bugs start as UNCONFIRMED, and have to be independently confirmed to become NEW. If they can’t be confirmed, the QA team often asks further details from the reporter, and sets the status to NEEDINFO.

Once a bug has been confirmed, a developer can pick it up, and either have the bug ASSIGNED to him or her – or submit a fix and set status to RESOLVED FIXED right away. Once the issue has been fixed, the fix should be (and sometimes is) VERIFIED.

A couple of other statuses could indicate different reasons why the bug report was closed: the bug is not there anymore (RESOLVED WORKSFORME), it was already reported (RESOLVED DUPLICATE) or it was not a bug in the first place (RESOLVED NOTABUG) to name a few.

This is the current status of the reported bugs:

Here we can see that most of them are either set to RESOLVED (1534) or to NEW (1302) which represent 41.8% and 35.5% of the total respectively. 373 are set to NEEDINFO and 257 are still UNCONFIRMED.

In the following chart, we can see that most of the RESOLVED bugs created during the last six months are closed as DUPLICATE (550) or already FIXED (549). 205 are closed as WORKSFORME, and 201 as NOTABUG.

Unconfirmed bugs

Having a low number of unconfirmed bugs allows the QA team to have a quicker feedback loop between users and developers.

On 17 November 2016, the number of unconfirmed bugs was at 562 – and on 11 May 2017 it was at 450, which shows a downward trend over the months:

During this time, 2941 bugs were triaged and moved from UNCONFIRMED to some other status by 174 people.

Top 20 ‘Confirmers’:

  1. Xisco Faulí (727)
  2. Buovjaga (648)
  3. V Stuart Foote (139)
  4. tommy27 (109)
  5. Áron Budea (101)
  6. m.a.riosv (94)
  7. Julien Nabet (84)
  8. Alex Thurgood (83)
  9. Heiko Tietze (81)
  10. Jacques Guilleron (79)
  11. Yousuf Philips (jay) (77)
  12. Telesto (69)
  13. Cor Nouws (40)
  14. Samuel Mehrbrodt (34)
  15. carlos.deambroggio (33)
  16. Regina Henschel (30)
  17. Olivier Hallot (24)
  18. Joel Madero (23)
  19. Miklos Vajna (22)
  20. Adolfo Jayme (22)

You can check the current list of unconfirmed bugs here. More help is always welcome in keeping the project healthy and bug-free!

This concludes the first part of the statistics – we’ll post the second part soon, so keep an eye on the blog.

Video interview: Olivier Hallot, Documentation Coordinator

Olivier is one of the founding members of The Document Foundation, and has been involved in LibreOffice (and OpenOffice.org before that) for many years. Today he works as the Documentation Coordinator for LibreOffice, and in this video he talks about updates to the technology used by the documentation team, as well as the importance of building communities:

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Month of LibreOffice, May 2017: The final week

There’s one more week to go in the Month of LibreOffice for May 2017 – so you still have a chance to get a snazzy printed sticker for your laptop or desktop PC! Here’s how many stickers have been awarded so far:

Click the number to see how the contributions are spread across projects in the community. Want to get a sticker yourself? Read on! Just by helping other users on Ask LibreOffice, or confirming a bug report, you can make LibreOffice better and get one of these…

How to get a sticker

There are many ways you can help the LibreOffice project and claim a sticker:

  • Answer questions from users: Over on Ask LibreOffice there are many users looking for help with the suite. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim a shiny sticker.
  • Help to confirm bugs: go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 10 and LibreOffice 5.3.2”. (Make sure you’re using the latest version of LibreOffice.)
  • Translate the interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.
  • Write documentation: Another way to earn a badge is to help the LibreOffice documentation team. Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.
  • Contribute code: The codebase is big, but there are lots of places to get involved with small jobs. See our Developers page on the website and this page on the wiki to get started. Once you’ve submitted a patch, if it gets merged we’ll send you a sticker!
  • Spread the word: Tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim a sticker. (We have a maximum of 100 stickers for this category, in case the whole internet starts tweeting!)

Don’t miss out! On June 1st we’ll post the results, and then start sending out the stickers…

Month of LibreOffice, May 2017: Printed stickers are here!

We’re 17 days into the Month of LibreOffice, May 2017 – and we’ve just gone over the 200 stickers mark. Yes, that’s 200 community members who’ve helped out with code, QA, translations, documentation, user support and marketing – and each one will receive a cool sticker for their laptops and other kit. Thanks everyone for your help!

Also, the printed stickers arrived at The Document Foundation today:

There are still two more weeks of the Month of LibreOffice to go – so don’t miss out on a sticker! Read on to find out how you can help the project (and millions of LibreOffice users around the world), and claim a sticker for yourself:

How to get a sticker

There are many ways you can help the LibreOffice project and claim a sticker:

  • Help to confirm bugs: go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 10 and LibreOffice 5.3.2”. (Make sure you’re using the latest version of LibreOffice.)
  • Contribute code: The codebase is big, but there are lots of places to get involved with small jobs. See our Developers page on the website and this page on the wiki to get started. Once you’ve submitted a patch, if it gets merged we’ll send you a sticker!
  • Translate the interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.
  • Write documentation: Another way to earn a badge is to help the LibreOffice documentation team. Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.
  • Answer questions from users: Over on Ask LibreOffice there are many users looking for help with the suite. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim a shiny sticker.
  • Spread the word: Tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim a sticker. (We have a maximum of 100 stickers for this category, in case the whole internet starts tweeting!)

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