Welcome again to all QA volunteers, New and Old! If you received this note, that means you are subscribed to the mailing list. That is good. It also means that you've received a lot of posts from me in recent days. Sorry about that. I do try to greet each new volunteer personally, and since most new volunteers have similar questions this leads to a lot of repetitive posts.
As we all get up to speed to the QA tasks, we'll spend more time discussing the actually QA work. And at some point others will feel comfortable welcoming our new volunteers as well. Remember, there is nothing special about me. If you know the answer to a question, or can point a new volunteer to the Orientation Modules, then please do. Recruiting and training new volunteers is ongoing activity for any thriving open source project. Indeed, the same is true for any thriving corporation as well. So where do we stand with the QA for OpenOffice? 1) There is a "respin" of AOO 3.4.1 in the works, planned for later this month. It does not have any code changes, but does have a set of additional new translations: Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean, Polish, Basque, Asturian and Scottish Gaelic. Since the code is unchanged, it is not requiring any functional testing by the QA team. But the localization team is reviewing the binaries to verify that the menus, dialogs, language tools (spell checking), etc., are working properly. If you are fluent in any of these 8 languages and want to help with this final review, please send a note to the localization mailing list at: [email protected]. 2) AOO 4.0 -- We're still waiting for a developer snapshot release that has the UI features added. When that comes out we can test it. But not yet. 3) Backlog of unconfirmed defect reports. We have 2984 unconfirmed defects, some dating back several years. This is an improvement over last week when we had 3016. But it is still a cause for concern that we have so many. Why? Although the severe bugs, the blocking, show-stopper bugs will always get attention, since they are so prominent, the more common place bugs, the ones that effect the user's daily experience and their perception of "quality", can get lost in the noise if we're not keeping up with new user bug reports, reviewing them and confirming them in a timely fashion. Now obviously this backlog was not created overnight. It is years in the making. And we won't eliminate it over night. But I'd love to make slow & steady progress to get this number down and keep it down. Twenty volunteers doing ten defect reports a week can eliminate this backlog before AOO 4.0 ships and we get flooded with new bug reports. That is why I am encouraging new volunteers to help with confirming defect reports. I'm doing the same myself. If you have not already been assigned a batch to work with, and want to help, let me know what platform(s) you can test on, and any special requests (I like Calc, anything but Base, etc.) and I'll get you started. Or feel free to run the following query in Bugzilla and assign yourself bugs that look interesting: https://issues.apache.org/ooo/buglist.cgi?cmdtype=runnamed&namedcmd=unconfirmed-defects&list_id=41761 (A bug that is currently assigned to "[email protected]" or assigned to an address ending in openoffice.org is currently unassigned) Thanks everyone for your hard work! -Rob
