Budgeting & investing in features ...

[Michael Meeks]

Hi guys,

	Last year TDF invested some of our donors money in a number of great
features and infrastructure pieces that were long term technical
problems for LibreOffice - particularly in the area of QA and tooling to
reduce regressions, but also eg. for longer term consistent
cross-platform shaping with Harfbuzz.

	It is budgeting time for the board again, and there is an opportunity
to come up with proposals for funding again for 2017, although the
time-line is somewhat short (due to the normal endemic dis-organization ;-)

	I'd like to restrict suggestions to those which a developer has a
reasonable chance of fixing in some sort of linear time & cost: we have
a very finite budget - ie. this is not a request for users to ask for
their pet features to be implemented ;-)

	Personally, I'm still highly interested in items that help grow the
community and make our life easier: for example more, and more reliable
tests that we can run in the CI (for example).

	Do you an idea for a whole domain of tests that can be
	created ?

	Is there something we can create to make it easier to
	write tests ?

	Is there something we can do to make it easy to write and
	debug macros, scripts etc. - particularly tests ?

	Is there some QA tool that is badly missing - which we could
	use to isolate bugs / regressions ?

	Is there some tooling or UI that could be used to improve help
	authoring in some specific way ?

	Is there some debilitating performance problem that slows us
	all down that could be improved with an investment of time ?

	Is there something that badly needs doing, but is too hard,
	dull, etc. to have got done yet, but which could be done with
	some money applied ?

	And lastly the controversial one:

	Is there some larger feature, platform, component, area of work
	that is bigger than a GSOC project but not huge enough to be too
	expensive that is critically missing, that has a concrete
	development plan to work on ?


	Replies by E-mail here are fine; private replies are ok if you're
unsure whether the idea is sensible =) I'll try to curate and collect
ideas - IIRC we used a wiki page last time to collect them - which I
can't now find ;-) We'll discuss this in the ESC call tomorrow before
going through some similar ranking scheme as last year to recommend
things to the board.

	Thanks !

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot