Hi Gianluca Gianluca Turconi wrote: > I've just read the article present on your news site: http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,16376,1660763,00.html?gusrc=rss > > and I have to say it includes misleading and false assertions, > which I consider harmful for both my professionalism and my efforts in > favor of the OpenOffice.org Free Software Community. > [ ... ] > In addition to this fact, I want to underline, as a personal correction > to the quoted article, the large contribution made by amateurs to the > OpenOffice.org Community, either with patches to the code (still > included into the OpenOffice.org Issuezilla tool) either with free > contribution to linguistic tools such as spellchecking dictionaries and > thesauri that *are* code and involve tens of volunteers and thousands > of work hours.
I understand your point and see it friendly. As others have indicated before, the articles' assertions could have been less emphatic. But I do agree with Andrew Brown's main point: the quality assurance protocol, the bugfixing process for OpenOffice needs a dramatic improvement. You can search my previous posts during the OOo 2.0 development process. I have become very very upset by the way user demanded features, or simple buxfixes are dealt with. There are screaming examples of bugfixes delayed for ages without a clear reason. I am sure any users that have visited isuezilla has his/her own list. And what about releasing 2.0 final with significant regressions?, like broken numbering styles. We are mirroring other's practices. I have reported some bugs myself, and found many others that were already reported. I do use issuezilla, browse it, read the buxfixes part of "release notes" etc. And have bad feelings from that readings. What really scares me (and I see this fear also in Brown's article) when browsing isssuezilla is the impression I get from the comments of the project members. In many cases it seems that those programmers have never used OOo themselves for a productive work. They do not seem to realize what's the use for the feature they are working in. There are many talks about interfaces, framework etc. but not on usability. In addition, live discussions are not frequent on issuezilla, I get the impression they are not wanted. It seems that issuezilla is seen by developers as a point to pick up clear and well-defined tasks. But it is impossible for end-users to setup such clear-cut commands. Issuezilla is complex and scares users, but more fundamentally, users do not know how to implement a feature, and programmers seem to listen only to "code-jargon": the two communities speak a different language. My impression is that we, OOo developers and users, need a better communication channel between these lists/newsgroups and core programmers. An intermediate layer between end-users and programmers, managed by experienced users with a knowledge of OOo internals (people like Andrew Brown himself and many others). Dedicating payed people to read these lists and extract statistics of most demanded features, most frequent FAQs, most frequent user confusion with tools etc. This would not be wasted money, even if that mean two programmers less for the core. Relying only in isuezilla votes has revealed non-practical. I see the need for some kind of authority that sum up user input, define tasks and priorize them for isuezilla. I have no doubt this process is done now, but on the programmers end and hidden from users. I would like to see this decicsion-making process open, transparent and web published. Last but not least, I must agree that bugfixing depends on good QA team. I do not know the internals of this process in OOo. I do not know if currently QA members are Sun employers or volunteers. I do see a need for full-time (payed) people. But I do see this as a very good niche for volunteer work. And I would not dismiss the efforts dedicated by QA volunteers as "not writing code". I read Andrew Brown's article as meaning that any effort (even non-programming tasks) put into bugfixing and quality assurance is essential for overall quality and success of the software. Thus, volunteer work into QA is, to my eyes, as important as the core-programmers team. An essential, and community-contributed, part of OOo development. The article missed this point: programmers are not all. Enrique --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
