I'm back from the QA weekend in Essen, Germany. The meeting took place at the "Linux Hotel" - Villa Vogelsang and it was coordinated by a team from the "OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V.". There were about 18 participants from Germany, Swizerland, the Netherlands and from Mongolia.

Most people came on Friday afternoon and in the evening we had a barbecue and we had a lot of fun... On Saturday morning Jacqueline Rahemipour and André Schnabel started with a tract about the current translation process and how it is seen by the German community.
Then Stefan Baltzer and I talked about the mission and dependencies of QA work within the project. Topics like "compliance of deadlines" and how it relates to QA work or if checks of already integrated issue fixes having the state "verified/fixed" help to identify potential problems of the integration process of child workspaces were discussed. Then we talked about creating synergies between the QA teams of OpenOffice.org native language teams. We discussed that it might be relevant that contact persons of different native language QA teams are published on the QA web page to be able to ask for advice.
After a lunch break Cor Nouws from the Dutch native language team informed us how QA work in the Netherlands is coordinated and he talked about other activities in the Netherlands like an "OpenOffice.org Café" that will be started as an event in a town near the Belgian border in June 2008. Then Badral Sanligiin representing the Mongolian community talked about his work on translating OpenOffice.org into the Mongolian language. It was very interesting to learn about this project. He said that UI translation is about 90% complete and he will commit it back to the OpenOffice.org code base in June/July this year as well as he commited patches that are needed for the input method needed for the traditional mongolian written language as it uses complex text layout that is different from the Cyrillic alphabet that is commonly used nowerdays. In the evening there was some kind of bug hunting party with a focus on the current developer snapshot BEA300_m2. It was a late night.

On Sunday Helge Delfs demoed his (still local) version of the QA status page called "QUASTE". Using this web application it will be possible to upload testtool results to a server to get immediate feedback about how this test results eg. of a CWS build relate to the master workspace where this CWS has been created on. Afterwards we talked about QA work on child workspaces and how someone can get information from the EIS webapplication. After a brainstorming session about spoilsport for community members and how to address these problems at the end of this weekend we talked about how to do some advertisement for QA application related sub projects.

All in all it was a really productive meeting and it was really good to have members of other native language projects who shared their knowledge with the other attendees. Special thanks go to Jacqueline who mostly planned this event.

tags: community event openoffice.org qa