First of all I want to introduce myself. I am Thorsten Ziehm, manager of Quality Assurance Team for StarOffice / OpenOffice.org at Sun. Round about 20 engineers are working full time on StarOffice / OpenOffice.org. 6 of them are responsible for writing scripts for automated testing with VCL-TestTool. Some of the engineers are ISTQB Certified Tester.

If you do not know, André Schnabel the former project lead of the OOo QA project retired from his position (from me a big thank you to André for his extraordinary work and exceeding effort in and for the project). The co-lead, Joost Andrae and I preferred a new lead from the community. Therefore we were pleased that Maho Nakata was voted as new lead.

When André announced that he will retire from the position as lead, I cogitated about the past years. The collaboration between me (and my team) with André and the QA project worked better and better over the time. But also I believe it could be increased.

The QA project did and do a extraordinary job. They find a huge mass of bugs in the product, release many smaller or bigger features and verify also a mass of fixed issues (concrete numbers for the last releases I will post in one of my next blogs). It's a pleasure to see the work of the community. They confirming issues, making L10N QA, releasing the L10N builds and making QA for platforms which are not supported by Sun. But the mass of daily work on the product is done by the Sun QA team. Check fixed issues in a CWS, check the fixes in the master build (developer snapshots) or what ever, why this work cannot be realized in the community more than now? One unclear issue can be the questions 'who should organize that work?' and 'who should be responsible?'.

My aim is, that on these questions the new QA project lead, Maho Nakata, the co-lead, Joost Andrae, and I would work on in the near future. My suggestion is to bring more and more responsibility and knowledge into the community. The reason must be clear. In the future it will be more difficult to approve all CWS (child work spaces) in time and in a high quality with the resources of my team only. The OOo development increase with every new bigger contributor or system vendor who want to bring in a new feature, a bug fix or try out a new extension for OOo. They write new code or write bugs, which have to be checked and verified. Often the contributors spend a development team only. They do not support the QA project intensely, or they have a dedicated QA team for their internal builds. In my view that is not enough for the high quality of OpenOffice.org and the derivatives of OOo, like StarOffice. Therefore I was pleased to welcome the NAST team (National Application Software Testing Labs) in the QA project. It's a QA team in China, which want to support the OpenOffice.org QA project.

One project I started in my team is to increase the documentation of the QA project on OOo. The web sites are sometimes not up to date and useful information are difficult to find. Please stay tuned for a first proposal in the next weeks. Also I want to bring more information of the application testing on OOo. And why not building QA teams with members of community and the Sun QA team to approve a new feature or only a single CWS with bug fixes.

There are many areas where the QA project can be increased. So I'm looking forward for the next exciting challenges and I want to support the new OOo QA project lead, Maho Nakata, as good as possible. I'm very interested into his visions for the project.