OpenOffice.org priority on adding new features vs. fixing bugs
OpenOffice.org developers agree that a renewed focus on fixing bugs is required
Follow @SavioRodriguesSun's Thorsten Ziehm of the OpenOffice.org engineering team wrote a post titled "Does OpenOffice.org 3.x have a general quality issue?"
Unless my mind is playing tricks on me, and I'm 98.2 percent sure it isn't, Thorsten's post was edited between when I first read it in the morning and when I decided to blog this afternoon. The edits seem to have removed any suggestion that OpenOffice.org could have a quality issue. Even in the original version of the post Thorsten had concluded that OpenOffice.org does not have a general quality issue.
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But in the original version, he did discuss some information that could point to a quality issue. For instance, the original showed that the total bugs reports had grown to over 13,000, of which about 3,000 were new feature requests. If memory serves me right, the defects and total numbers were much higher than previous releases. But with more OpenOffice.org users, this increase did not point to a quality issue by itself.
Thorsten concludes that there may not be a general quality issue with OpenOffice.org, but other goals remain:
We have to work still on stabilizing the existing functionality instead of concentrating on newer functionality only.
This is a similar conclusion that Andre Schnabel comes to in his reply to Thorsten's post (not sure if Andre's reply was to version 1 or version 2 of Thorsten's post):
While one may argue (endless) if the product as a quality issue or not, the real point is, that the OOo project's process of identifying, handling and finally fixing bugs is not really satisfying.
Andre goes on to conclude that we can make OpenOffice.org better:
- joint and better coordinated efforts from QA and development to *fix* bugs
- the common goal of the project to work on bugfixing (instead of the separate statement of the QA project that fixing bugs is not within our responsibility)
- the commitment to fix bugs even in old features (and not only regressions). Each feature once was new. Following our current policy you just need to wait long enough to counter the regression argument.
