[Libreoffice-qa] Ask: How can we interoperate with QA and Bugzilla?

[Robinson Tryon]

[cc'd QA list as this is relevant to their interests]

One of the perennial questions about the Ask site is "How do we
interoperate with QA (and the QA Team) and Bugzilla?"

We often get questions on the Ask site such as this:

http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/16015/excel-xml-2003-file-gives-general-error/
> I have a file in 2003 xml format that Excel happily accepts but
> LibreOffice gives a General error when it tries to open it. Any
> ideas?

It would be easy to send the user directly to FDO, but the bug tracker
can be a scary place. Often we send a user over there, and they ping
us back on the Ask site when they haven't received a response to their
bug. Sometime their bug will get marked 'NEEDINFO' or 'NO REPRO', but
the user might not know what they need to do next.

I think that the QA Team and the active users of the Ask site need to
get a bit more friendly, and perhaps share some ideas about how to
best help our users. If you think about it, we do a lot of the same
things:

- Users come to us with problems
- We try to triage the reports
- We ask for more information
- We try to provide solutions or find someone who can

One thing that could help our process would be to make it easier to
take a question from the Ask site and send it to FDO.

I've started some guidelines on when we should send a Question to
FDO[1], but I'd like more input from our contributors. The bugtracker
is really optimal for things like
- reproducing bugs
- keeping track of the details required for repro (OS, LO version, etc..)
- interacting with developers

To improve the guidelines, it would be great to have QA folks use the
Ask site more, and have Ask site members be more involved with QA. I
know that a number of people on the Ask site are already involved in
QA, including Pedro, Manfred, Rainer, etc.., and I know that I've seen
QA folks such as Joren and Joel over on the Ask site :-)

If anyone has suggestions on how we can improve our communication or
collaboration, please ping me directly or via the list. I'd like to
hear from more of you!

Together, I think that we can improve both the Ask site and QA, and
make the LibreOffice support system a less scary and more responsive
experience for our users.

Cheers,
-- Robinson 'qubit' Tryon

[1] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Ask/Getting_Started