[Libreoffice-qa] Next level of QA and how to get there

Ilmari Lauhakangas ilmari.lauhakangas at libreoffice.org
Wed Jun 13 13:05:12 UTC 2018


The impact of the QA team has been roughly on the same level for four 
years and it is getting boring. Now that we have new contributors 
trickling in through VolunteerMatch, we have some hope of leveling up.

What does getting to the next level mean? Freedom. We will be able to 
learn new skills and complete projects that have been languishing in our 
TODOs for ages. Maybe even have time to read a book or watch a movie (I 
know, preposterous).

I will use unconfirmeds as a yardstick as that is something we can all 
easily grasp.
The assumption is that we continue to get 500-800 reports per month.
A prerequisite to leveling up is that the triaging work is spread evenly 
between contributors. In practice: only needing an average rate of one 
triaged report per day per regular tester. This would signal sustainability.

When we manage to keep the number of unconfirmeds below 100 for several 
months, QA will have moved to the next level.

The effects will be:
- no long periods of incomplete triaging (debug traces or bisects missing)
- more people will get into writing UI tests
- we will have time to do manual tests before releases
- we will have time to think about and improve the presentation of our 
work (stats, Dashboard), tech docs and the tools we use (Bugzilla etc.)

This will require roughly ten more regular contributors compared to the 
level of April 2018.

When we manage to slam the unconfirmeds below 50, LibreOffice itself 
will move to the next level.

The effects:
- nearly instant triaging of incoming reports
- veteran contributors will move more and more into fixing bugs and 
writing cppunit tests
- QA will bleed into other teams, filling the gaps - documentation is a 
natural fit as testers are the first to deal with new functionality and 
changes

This will require twenty more regular contributors and among these there 
has to be power users with knowledge of macros, UNO API, databases, 
files over network, digital signatures and similar advanced user topics.

Ilmari


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