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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…

LibreOffice leverages Google’s OSS-Fuzz to improve quality of office suite

Berlin, May 23, 2017 – For the last five months, The Document Foundation has made use of OSS-Fuzz, Google’s effort to make open source software more secure and stable, to further improve the quality and reliability of LibreOffice’s source code. Developers have used the continuous and automated fuzzing process, which often catches issues just hours after they appear in the upstream code repository, to solve bugs – and potential security issues – before the next binary release.

LibreOffice is the first free office suite in the marketplace to leverage Google’s OSS-Fuzz. The service, which is associated with other source code scanning tools such as Coverity, has been integrated into LibreOffice’s security processes – under Red Hat’s leadership – to significantly improve the quality of the source code.

According to Coverity Scan’s last report, LibreOffice has an industry leading defect density of 0.01 per 1,000 lines of code (based on 6,357,292 lines of code analyzed on May 15, 2017). “We have been using OSS-Fuzz, like we use Coverity, to catch bugs – some of which may turn into security issues – before the release. So far, we have been able to solve all of the 33 bugs identified by OSS-Fuzz well in advance over the date of disclosure”, says Red Hat’s Caolán McNamara, a senior developer and the leader of the security team at LibreOffice.

Additional information about Google OSS-Fuzz is available on the project’s homepage on GitHub – https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz – and on Google Open Source Blog: (1) https://opensource.googleblog.com/2016/12/announcing-oss-fuzz-continuous-fuzzing.html (announcement), and (2) https://opensource.googleblog.com/2017/05/oss-fuzz-five-months-later-and.html (results after five months).

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!)

Video interview: Florian Effenberger, Executive Director at TDF

Florian is one of the founders of The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind LibreOffice. He’s also TDF’s Executive Director, overseeing a small team that works on release building, documentation, QA, design and marketing for LibreOffice. In this interview, he explains how TDF is structured, how it’s funded, and how the money is used.

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(Update: we also interviewed Florian in German, and have now uploaded the video.)

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