Google Trends is a service which compares end user searches for specific terms, and as such is a useful marketing tool to get some insight on the awareness of LibreOffice in comparison with other applications. I have compared the five alternatives to the leading office suite during the last 12 months: LibreOffice is leading, followed – as expected – by OpenOffice and WPS Office. LibreOffice is also leading in term of geographical coverage.
The sun never sets on the LibreOffice community, as there are always active members in some countries. Unfortunately, only a minimal part of this global effort is reflected on this blog, which should feature all activities and achievements. In order to get to this objective, we warmly invite all native language communities around the world to send us a short synopsis and a couple of pictures – if available – every time they do something significant for LibreOffice: a talk at a conference, a booth at an exhibition, a meeting, a conference, a localization sprint, or any other event. The same for achievements such as LibreOffice adoptions by government bodies, central or local public administrations, or large enterprises. Just send an email to media@documentfoundation.org, and we will take care of writing the blog post (if necessary, we will translate the local language to English).
With LibreOffice 6.0 due to be released at the end of the month, we’ve been talking to various communities involved in the project. In the last couple of weeks, we’ve chatted with the localisation and documentation teams, and today it’s the turn of QA (quality assurance), which is coordinated by Xisco Fauli…
What has the QA community been working on in preparation for LibreOffice 6.0?
During the development of LibreOffice 6.0, three Bug Hunting Sessions were held (6.0 Alpha1, 6.0 Beta1 and RC1), the last one just two weeks ago. There was also a parallel event organized by Muhammet Kara in Ankara, where volunteers gathered to test LibreOffice 6.0 RC1. Besides that, the QA team is constantly testing the latest daily builds, testing new features, and triaging the bugs reported on Bugzilla.
What are your favourite new features in this release?
That’s a difficult question, especially taking into account all the improvements done in this release to LibreOffice Android Viewer, to LibreOffice Online or the work done by the Google Summer of Code students among others. But if I had to choose one, I think I’d go for the characters dialog refactoring done by Akshay Deep and the UX (user experience) team, as this is probably the feature I will use the most in the near future. Here’s how it looks:
What tools and services do you use in the QA community?
A very handy tool recently completed by Markus Mohrhard is the automated updater for Windows and Linux, which allows the QA team to test daily builds without having to manually download the latest build every time.
This is very practical as testers no longer need to worry about constantly updating to the latest build, and can focus more on testing the program instead, assured that they are testing changes done to the code just the day before.
This tool was presented at the beginning of the LibreOffice 6.0 development cycle, and I believe it will have a very positive impact on the quality of 6.0 as it shortens the time between a problem being introduced in the code, and the time it’s found.
Another tool we’ve been using for some time now is the bibisect repositories, which allow us to find the exact code commit where a bug was introduced, increasing the chances that the bug gets fixed and reducing the time until it gets fixed.
Another tool which is fulling working now is a set of scripts called office-interoperability-tools that we use to automatically find document layout regressions in the master code branch compared to other office suites (in our case we use MS Office). Right now we use it with 8,450 files, and I believe it will also have a positive impact on the quality of LibreOffice 6.0.
Finally, it’s important to mention the main tool used in QA, Bugzilla, the place where all bugs are reported and triaged. Then there’s the wiki page where the QA documentation can be found, and testlink, the application to manage manual tests.
Finally, how can people get involved with the QA community?
The’re many ways one can help LibreOffice QA. Probably the simplest one would be: download the latest pre-release build (LibreOffice 6.0 RC2 as of today), install it and use it as you would use LibreOffice in your daily basis (but take into account it’s still a pre-release, so it’s not recommended to use it with important documents). If you find anything working incorrectly, please report it to Bugzilla.
On the other hand, if you prefer to follow a set of manual tests, you can use testlink (see the documentation for that. We also need help to triage bugs that are not-yet-confirmed, or retest old bugs to see if they might have been fixed.
Lastly, if you’re looking for something especially exciting things to do, you can help us to test daily builds, bisect bugs or write UI-tests. Don’t hesitate to join the #libreoffice-qa channel and say hello. We’ll be grateful to help you with any question or problem you have!
Much gratitude to Xisco and the diligent QA community for helping to make LibreOffice 6.0 a solid release. Their efforts are appreciated by users across the world. Next up, we talk to the design and development communities – more on this blog very soon…
The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to
provide consultancy on implementing features in LibreOffice
to start work as soon as possible. TDF is looking for an individual or company to give technical consultancy on the implementation of one or more of the following:
As part of the tender, TDF is explicitly looking into on-site development training on these topics for the community to share knowledge and enable contributors to get involved. This training is to be delivered during the next LibreOffice Hackfest in Hamburg (April 7-8, 2018)
More details on this approach can be found at https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/msg03988.html
Required skills
We exclusively use free, libre and open source (FLOSS) software for development wherever possible, and the resulting work must be licensed under the the Mozilla Public License v2.0.
Other skills
Applications should
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 certified developers and/or 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 and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org no later than February 5, 2018. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.
Applicants who have not received feedback by February 18, 2018 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.
In 2017, The Document Foundation has announced the availability of a Dashboard, based on data gathered from several development-related repositories. It is a very useful resource for marketing, as it can be configured to provide either an overview of the project or several detailed charts which can be used to get a more precise picture of what has happened in term of commits, committers, organizations, and issues. The time span covered by the dashboard can be set by the user, from days to years.
The three histograms show trends related to commits, committers and organizations during the last 12 months (clicking on the thumbnails will open a large image, easier to read).
Commits and committers show a rather stable trend, which confirms the maturity of the project. The very few lows in commits are either seasonal or related to the LibreOffice Conference, when core developers are spending most of their time on knowledge sharing rather than on code hacking.
The organizations’ histogram adds the affiliation bit to commits. Collabora, Red Hat and independent volunteer developers (marked as “unknown” in the legend) are the three largest group of contributors, followed by CIB and SIL. Of course, we would like to see more contributions from developers paid by large organizations deploying LibreOffice for personal productivity.
The following four thumbnails show the dashboard home configured for the following time intervals: 2 years, 1 year, 6 months and 90 days. They provide some interesting insights.
Our global community of volunteers, represented by The Document Foundation and based on many independent native language projects, is one of the main strengths of LibreOffice. Starting from today, we launch a new weekly blog post – scheduled on Wednesday – focused on community activities: events, seminars, conferences, projects with schools and central or local government bodies, achievements, etcetera. We want to show the world how diverse and inclusive is our community, and at the same time we want our community members to be proud of being part of it.
One of the largest and strongest LibreOffice communities is based in Indonesia. From March 23 to March 25, 2018, they will organize their first LibreOffice Conference Indonesia in Surabaya: 3 days of meetings based on Workshops, Seminars, Discussions about The Document Foundation, and gathering of LibreOffice advocates and activists. The event is also intended to be a form of thanks to LibreOffice developers who have provided the outstanding free software solution.
LibreOffice Conference Indonesia will be hosted by the Politeknik Elektronika Negeri Surabaya. The event will start on March 23 with a workshop focused on testing LibreOffice builds and localizations, and will follow on March 24 with a full day of seminars on everything LibreOffice, from an introduction to LibreOffice 6.0 to success stories and technical talks. The last day, March 25, will be dedicated to the meeting of LibreOffice Indonesian community members. Call for Papers is already open, and will close on February 8, 2018.
