Budgeting & investing in features ...

Hi guys,

        Last year TDF invested some of our donors money in a number of great
features and infrastructure pieces that were long term technical
problems for LibreOffice - particularly in the area of QA and tooling to
reduce regressions, but also eg. for longer term consistent
cross-platform shaping with Harfbuzz.

        It is budgeting time for the board again, and there is an opportunity
to come up with proposals for funding again for 2017, although the
time-line is somewhat short (due to the normal endemic dis-organization ;-)

        I'd like to restrict suggestions to those which a developer has a
reasonable chance of fixing in some sort of linear time & cost: we have
a very finite budget - ie. this is not a request for users to ask for
their pet features to be implemented ;-)

        Personally, I'm still highly interested in items that help grow the
community and make our life easier: for example more, and more reliable
tests that we can run in the CI (for example).

        Do you an idea for a whole domain of tests that can be
        created ?

        Is there something we can create to make it easier to
        write tests ?

        Is there something we can do to make it easy to write and
        debug macros, scripts etc. - particularly tests ?

        Is there some QA tool that is badly missing - which we could
        use to isolate bugs / regressions ?

        Is there some tooling or UI that could be used to improve help
        authoring in some specific way ?

        Is there some debilitating performance problem that slows us
        all down that could be improved with an investment of time ?

        Is there something that badly needs doing, but is too hard,
        dull, etc. to have got done yet, but which could be done with
        some money applied ?

        And lastly the controversial one:

        Is there some larger feature, platform, component, area of work
        that is bigger than a GSOC project but not huge enough to be too
        expensive that is critically missing, that has a concrete
        development plan to work on ?


        Replies by E-mail here are fine; private replies are ok if you're
unsure whether the idea is sensible =) I'll try to curate and collect
ideas - IIRC we used a wiki page last time to collect them - which I
can't now find ;-) We'll discuss this in the ESC call tomorrow before
going through some similar ranking scheme as last year to recommend
things to the board.

        Thanks !

                Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks@collabora.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot