Tender to design and implement a profile safe mode for LibreOffice (#201604-01)

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to

design and implement a profile safe mode for LibreOffice

to start work as soon as possible.

For bug reports and QA issues, users are from time to time required to use a fresh user profile, i.e. without settings different from the built-in defaults, with no document restore enabled and with all extensions disabled. Until now, the easiest route to achieve this is to delete or rename the existing user profile.

A feature should be implemented that enables the user to start LibreOffice in a temporary safe mode as outlined above, without having to manually delete their profile, and with the ability to return to the regular state afterwards.

In addition, the user should be able to choose which elements are to be put in safe mode, e.g. configuration, extension, documents, templates, and also be presented with an option to actually reset their profile permanently.

Besides an UI item from where the functionality can be triggered, the safe mode dialog should also pop up after a program crash to help the user identify and report the problem.

The scope of this task includes:

  • definition of elements to temporarily reset
  • implementation of menu item and dialog to trigger functionality
  • showing the dialog after the program has crashed (user-configurable)
  • define the program default state, factoring in pre-configuration by distributions or enterprise deployments
  • test and document the functionality

Required Skills

C++ Programming language for the LibreOffice client part

Other Skills

English (Conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, your financial expectations (name the final price for the turnkey project), and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org no later than May 6, 2016. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

Applicants who have not received feedback by June 6, 2016 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

Tender for a Quality Assurance Engineer (#201601-01)

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks a

Quality Assurance Engineer

to start work as soon as possible.

The role, which is scheduled for 20 hours a week, includes amongst other items:

  • keep a continuous overview and reporting on the state and progress of LibreOffice QA as seen on its bug trackers, mailing lists, Gerrit, and other tools and communication channels (e.g. Jenkins, IRC)
  • foster communication between QA and other teams
  • help community outreach to encourage more people to join the QA team and help onboarding new QA contributors
  • provide and regularly maintain bibisect repositories of the LibreOffice codebase
  • maintain, update and create feature patches for our Bugzilla instance
  • organize and coordinate bug hunting sessions
  • stress test LibreOffice development builds daily on multiple platforms
  • triage unconfirmed bugs on master
  • run master to try to find regressions early in release cycles
  • run release tests on alphas, betas and release candidates to identify blockers
  • create, improve, and keep up-to-date and understandable documentation, howtos and introductions for volunteers to LibreOffice QA
  • represent the QA project during weekly ESC calls

The role requires the following:

  • an established relationship within the quality assurance team as well as with other teams including development and marketing, and with users
  • ability to build and run LibreOffice daily on different platforms and operating systems
  • understanding of many of the features within each component and ability to learn other features quickly
  • stress testing each component daily
  • understanding of BugZilla
  • a general understanding of LibreOffice code
  • ability to write automated tests to ensure consistent quality in future releases
  • an understanding of quality assurance procedures
  • a firm understanding of bibisect, both the code and how to use it
  • use of MozTrap for running manual tests

Speaking and writing English fluently is a mandatory requirement.

The work time during the day is flexible, apart from some fixed times when availability is required (e.g. during meetings, which usually take place at 1400 or 1500 UTC once per week).

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The job is offered on a freelance basis. Work happens from the applicant’s home office, which can be located anywhere in the world.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, including curriculum vitae, your financial expectations, and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org no later than March 1, 2016, midnight UTC. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

If you haven’t received feedback by April 1, 2016 your application could not be considered.

Tender to implement improved format validity checks (#201512-07)

noun_111382_ccThe Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to

design and implement improved format validity checks

to start work as soon as possible.

We would like to ensure that the files the LibreOffice applications write are valid, using the most powerful freely available tools at hand.

The scope of this task includes:

  • making sure that extensions to ODF are tracked
  • break the LibreOffice build in case written files are not valid

It requires:

  • having an ODF / rng schema with our extensions in git, and use it in odfvalidator for all files written in unit tests and crash tests
  • making sure an extension to ODF breaks that test
  • use the MS binary format validator under wine, for the MS binary formats

Required Skills

C++ Programming language for the LibreOffice client part

Other Skills

English (Conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, your financial expectations (name the final price for the turnkey project), and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at no later than January 29, 2016. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

Applicants who have not received feedback by March 1, 2016 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

Tender for Automated Help/Documentation screenshot creation (#201512-06)

noun_112843_ccThe Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to

design and implement automated help/documentation screenshot creation

to start work as soon as possible.

Currently the LibreOffice documentation as well as the on-line help contain a large number of screenshots. This increases singificantly the cost of changing the UI, as it involves manual re-taking of screenshots and getting them translated.

The scope of this task is to:

  • opening and closing every dialog to increase UI test coverage
  • provide an automated mechanism to create and maintain screenshots in documents, featuring cropping and highlighting information based on the widget structure of each dialog, by
    • creating a small RDF description of where a screenshot comes from
    • creating the commandline tool to do screenshot updates, and core infrastructure to take those shots, and mark them up for each language
    • providing a few exemplary images in a number of documentation files, along with an easy HOWTO to improve these files in future
    • providing an easy-to-use UI to both create, and annotate screenshots of the current version inside LibreOffice (enabled in some developer mode)
    • setting up a server / VM to do a looped headless re-build of the documentation to form part of our test suite

An automated (ideally headless) tool should be provided that can take an existing documentation file, read RDF data describing screenshots associated with each image, re-fresh that image, and produce a new output file with updated images and the same meta-data.

Required Skills

C++ Programming language for the LibreOffice client part

Other Skills

English (Conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, your financial expectations (name the final price for the turnkey project), and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at no later than January 29, 2016. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

Applicants who have not received feedback by March 1, 2016 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

Tender for cross-platform font/shaping stubs for layout tests (#201512-05)

noun_83825_ccThe Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to

implement cross-platform font/shaping stubs for layout tests

to start work as soon as possible.

TDF looks into funding reliable layout tests, extending those that currently exist (e.g. those for charting, which are currently not reproducible on all machines due to font/platform shaping differences).

TDF is looking for an individual or company to, as a turnkey project, design and implement the following:

  • design and implement a dummy/stubbed font/shaping backend, re-using our existing AFM parser
  • ship some AFMs for common legacy PostScript fonts compatible with Arial, Times New Roman, Courier and OpenSymbol
  • be equipped with a dummy shaper

The code is required to work cross-platform to allow layout testing on Windows, Linux and Mac.
The deliverables involve enabling the existing chart tests, and showing they work across platforms. Also the creation of minimal sample layout test documents for Writer, Calc and Impress to allow a simple baseline from which to build more complex tests.

Required Skills

C++ Programming language for the LibreOffice client part

Other Skills

English (Conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, your financial expectations (name the final price for the turnkey project), and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at no later than January 29, 2016. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

Applicants who have not received feedback by March 1, 2016 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.