Hi team,

together with my colleague Uwe Luebbers I plan a QA camp at the OpenOffice.org conference in Orvieto, Italy. The conference is scheduled from November 3rd, 2009 until November 6th, 2009. The QA Camp will happen on Thursday, November 5th from 4:15 pm to 7:00 pm and it is planned as "open house" event.

You're invited to talk talk with us about QA topics in general
The QA Camp is open for "short" presentations as discussion starters
If there is enough time and If you like we could do some "bug hunting" means we could work on issues
We'd like to talk with you about iTeams and childworkspace work in general
Is application specific QA something for you ?

Maybe you'll attend to this event and you want to add a topic.
QA members who already worked on childworkspaces and those who were actively involved into application specific QA and testing are invited to bring-in their knowledge

If you want to participate and bring you in then please notify me either via QA mailing list or via direct email.

tags: events ooocon2009 openoffice.org qa

Last weekend the German QA team, people from Switzerland and a volunteer from Austria met at the conference hotel "Linux Hotel" in Essen, Germany to talk about quality assurance within OpenOffice.org and to work and inform each other.

Topics discussed:

Automation
Responsibilities
Communication
Tooling for QA (Testtool, Quaste, Buildbots, Testbots)

Friday
In the evening, most of the attendees arrived and held a barbecue, starting to talk intensively about OpenOffice.org QA and it's processes.

Saturday
Jaqueline Rahemipour opened the event, providing organizational information and talked about technical items regarding the location.

Rafael Bircher talked about child workspaces, master workspaces, working with IssueTracker, EIS and with build bots.

Mechtilde Stehmann informed about the OpenOffice.org release process and talked about the organizational background.

Stefan Baltzer talked about "breeding and fostering of quality" (Editor's note: I'm not sure if there is such a colloquial available within the English language...). Based on the presentation that Thorsten Ziehm held at the OOo Conference in Beijing in November 2008, he gave an overview about quality assurance in general. Then he moved to the current QA work within the OOo project, reflecting the perception of quality from different points of view. As intended, a contructive dialog about responsibilities, commitment and competency within the project arose.
This dialog blended over to the so-called "issue/bug hunting party". For more than 8 hours, a huge amount of unconfirmed issues were processed. All people involved had a lot of fun and enhanced knowledge about issue processing.

Sunday
André Schnabel presented the latest OTE Translation tool as well as news in Pootle.

Helge Delfs presented the current state and features of the QUASTE application. People were impressed about the intuitive and helpful information QUASTE can refine from test results uploaded to its database.

Last but not least I would like to thank Jacqueline Rahemipour for successfully organizing this event.

tags: events openoffice.org qa

Not only today is a Document Freedom Day but we celebrated it today. I attended an event in Hamburg where we had three places where volunteers (mostly from exis-unlimited.org, FSF Europe and from Sun) talked about the advantages of open and standardized document formats and about the ODF document format in detail. The weather situation (snow, wind and again snow) forced us to give up two of the booths after some hours and to concentrate all activites at one place. In my opinion this event was quite successful and I'm looking forward to attend similar events in future. Maybe you'd like to plan something similar ?

tags: events odf opendocument

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tags: community events openoffice.org party qa

My name is Stefan Baltzer. I am working as QA Engineer (TechLead Writer QA for OpenOffice.org and StarOffice) for >10 years now.

As announced in the blogs of Thorsten Ziehm and Joost Andrae, we held an IRC clean-up/bug hunting party this week from Tuesday, 11:00 to Wednesday, 11:00.

Beside several Sun QA people and developers from Hamburg, we had participants from China, France, Russia, Japan, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Czech Republic and Germany.

In these 24 hours, 130 formerly "unconfirmed" issues were processed (mostly closed as fixed or duplicates, or confirmed and reassigned). This is a valuable success.

We sliced off 10% of the "unconfirmed cake" (1300 issues on Tuesday). A little more detailed: Framework -27, Writer -74, Calc/Chart -10 Graphics -5, Base -8. This clearly shows that we should consider to repeat similar events.

We surely did redundant work. But that was a good thing in this case. When several people read, riddle about and manage to reproduce or nail down the same issue, it is a group experience as well as a very fast "help desk". As a matter of fact, everyone has a different knowledge background about platforms, applications, whatever is needed to track down an issue. This is the most valuable power in such a team effort.

All people involved did willingly share their experience with all others. So beside the "numbers", we "produced" knowledge and fun for all involved people.

Is there a better outcome of a team effort than "numbers, fun and valuable knowledge"? - I don’t think so.

Since we learned from what we did, we will do it again. This will be discussed on the QA mailing list.

At this point, I would like to thank all of you who supported this party. The "issue eaters" as well as the "silent readers" who just joined the chat without writing actively. At least, this showed that we triggered world-wide attention with this party.

tags: community events openoffice.org party qa

QA team,

my colleague Stefan Baltzer started a discussion on dev@qa.openoffice.org about having a 24 hour bug hunting/cleanup 'party' on IRC irc://irc.freenode.net#qa.openoffice.org  next Tuesday focusing on open issues that have been fixed/verified and that need verification within one of the latest milestone builds as well as unconfirmed issues that need confirmation and to talk about application specific issues.

I'm interested into your opinion. Please comment the email from Stefan 'IssueTracker need a clean up'. Stefan will follow-up next Monday.

Kind regards,  Joost

tags: events openoffice.org qa

I'll attend this year's CeBIT 2008 trade fair in Hannover, Germany from March 4th to March 9th.
If you like to visit our OpenOffice.org booth then please come to the "Business Solutions Park" in hall 5, E57.

This trade fair event at CeBIT 2008 is planned by OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V. and there are following exhibitors: OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V., SCAI, O³Spaces, Mobility Office Solutions AG and last but not least Sun Microsystems.
Azul Coffee, Duden and LinuxHotel are supporting our activities.

You are welcome!

tags: community events extensions openoffice.org staroffice

It's almost two weeks ago but I thought this event might be interesting for you.

The weekend from May 4th to May 6th the German QA team met at Villa Vogelsang which is also known as LinuxHotel in Essen, Germany. The event has been funded by the non-profit association "OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V."

Most of the attendees came on May, 4th in the evening because we wanted to start early on saturday in the morning. The first evening started with a BBQ and socializing with each other.

On saturday morning Jaqueline Rahemipour (DE project co-lead) started with a short introduction into the schedule, technical questions and organizational topics. Afterwards she gave a brief review of the QA work that has been done within the german QA team within the last twelve months. She gave feedback about the work on CWS mergede01 (removing the dependency to have the german language as source code language) and things that can be made better.

Then Stefan Baltzer (Writer QA lead @ Sun) and myself introduced the redesign of the QA pages and we talked about the advantages they're now restuctured into application specific pages.  If you're interested into working together with application specific QA then please drop a note within dev@qa mailing list.
On saturday afternoon Regina Henschel gave a brilliant demonstration of the upcoming new chart implementation and she talked about her experiences regarding the work on help texts. That was really well done.
Afterwards Jacqueline focussed on the coordination of the next UI review and presented the CWS keyid01. When using key-id builds it's possible to get the corresponding id's of strings that are within the translation database @ Sun. She also talked about the german style guide.

In the evening we had a 'bughunting party' until ~01:30am. We tried to use the build bots to compile a new build but failed (AFAIK the build bot had a configuration problem). Jacqueline and Simon Wilper then started to do a Linux build on Jacqelines' notebook. By using SRC680_m211 build we were able to verify issues of child workspaces that were integrated into this version. Some people confirmed issues, some closed verified issues and some filed new issues. It was really fun to work together with a fairly big team at such an event.


On sunday Petr Dudacek (Globalization engineer at Sun) talked about the translation process and he gave a  presentation about the new translation process Damien Donlon has been working on in the past few months He talked about the basic workflow (Pootle server as a central point for the translatable content) and gave a demonstration about the tools.
Afterwards Eric Hoch gave a very interesting presentation where he showed all OpenOffice.org MacOSX implementations side by side. He talked about background information regarding the current Aqua implementation. After a break Mechtilde Stehmann talked about 'Localization QA' vs. 'Release QA', about differentiations of the test methods and about experiences she made with TCM.

At the end of this weekend Simon Wilper gave a presentation about how to build OpenOffice.org. He talked about CVS, setup of buildenvironment and he gave a  ./configure howto. At the end of his meeting we modified the build to have menu entries completely mirrored...what fun!

Simon Wilper prepared a some slides about how to build the application:

en-US: http://de.openoffice.org/files/documents/66/3980/build-ooo-howto-linux-x86-pres-en.odp

de: http://de.openoffice.org/files/documents/66/3979/build-ooo-howto-linux-x86-pres.odp

In general the meeting was very productive and informative for everyone and besides the program we worked on chart2 CWS, testing SRC680_m211 master build, buildbot environment, building the application locally (Jacqueline got her first build done). Several (fixed/verified) P1 issues were closed and this meeting was very important for the (German) QA team to get additional insights. I'm looking forward to the next meeting and I'm open to join similar meetings elsewhere (if manageable).

More information can be found here (in German):
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/DE:QA-Wochenende2007

Some photos can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/oooqaweekendessen2007/

tags: events openoffice.org qa