New Program to Squash Key Bugs in LibreOffice

If you're like many of us here at OStatic, you've probably been using the LibreOffice suite of applications for some time now. And, without a doubt, this suite has become very impressive both in terms of its overall capabilities and in terms of the speed with which problems are addressed. New releases of the suite clean up lots of bugs, with community support behind the effort. But there is a new and aggressive program that has just been introduced to crack down further on bugs in LibreOffice. Dubbed HardHacks, it should make the suite much better--and do so quickly.

For some time now, a program called EasyHacks has helped iron out bugs in LibreOffice through organized QA efforts. Now, as announced in a blog post, a new HardHacks program is taking shape:

"This is what is hiding behind that buzzword:

• - The QA team will start in their next call to identify the 5 most critical bugs that need attention. It will repeat that from now on in each of their calls every second week.
  To qualify, these bugs have to be:
  • - Among the MAB (most annoying bugs)
  • -be triaged as far as possible (e.g. reproduction scenario, version the bug was introduced if it is a regression, best: bibisect for regressions) so they are both important/urgent and well-prepared
• - These bugs will be handed over to the core developers
• - ESC will try to find a core developer for each bug to look at it and report back in the next week

The aim of this is to keep awareness of these critical bugs high in development and having some kind of qualified feedback in the given timeframe (ideally one week, but at least until the next QA call)."

You've got to hand it to the LibreOffice team to have an acronym for Most Annoying Bugs. According to the post, we'll also hear more about significant bugs in the suite as they arise:

"The QA team will also try to blog about the results we got for the batch of bugs that were selected — this bit of extra fame is hopefully is another piece of motivation for the developers looking at bugs. Oh, and of course your help in cornering the bugs from both the QA and the development side is most welcome!"

Who knows, with this kind of organized attention to bug squashing, we might even see official bug bounties for identification of significant problems in LibreOffice.