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Posted to qa@openoffice.apache.org by Pedro Lino <pe...@gmail.com> on 2014/09/16 17:42:02 UTC

Progress and Quality

Hi all QAers

I'm wondering if I'm missing something or development really stopped/slowed
down since the 4.1.1 release? (according to this site
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/openoffice/trunk/main/?sortby=date the last
modification was *r1623850* on Tue Sep 9 15:35:43 2014 UTC)

On a separate note, from a Quality perspective it would probably would be a
good idea if Apache OpenOffice code was scanned by one of these Coverity
analysis
http://www.newswire.ca/en/story/1411430/libreoffice-makes-strides-in-software-quality-with-coverity-scan

Kind regards,
Pedro

Re: Progress and Quality

Posted by Andrea Pescetti <pe...@apache.org>.
On 17/09/2014 Ariel Constenla-Haile wrote:
> openoffice.git]$ git shortlog -s -n --all
> ...  70  Andrea Pescetti

Not to steal the merits of others... under my name there are at least 4 
people, due to the way SVN works. If I commit work by someone else, and 
this happens for example for patches contributed through Bugzilla, SVN 
(and, as a consequence, git) attributes it to me. Same for all other SVN 
committers.

Regards,
   Andrea.

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Re: Progress and Quality

Posted by Pedro Lino <pe...@gmail.com>.
Hi Ariel

Actually, the problem is that there isn't so many people participating
> in coding.


Unfortunately that is what I figured...


> Cloning http://git.apache.org/openoffice.git and running the
> commands at the bottom of this message, gives of good overview of
> code-contribution (as it does not include the websites).


Ok. But the results would basically be the same. So the SVN activity
(excluding website) is a good way to check for updates to the code.


> The answer to
> your question might be that people at Hamburg are on Holidays.
>

That would seem to be the major explanation.

Thank you for the honest answer ;)

Regards,
Pedro

Re: Progress and Quality

Posted by Ariel Constenla-Haile <ar...@apache.org>.
Hi Pedro,

On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 11:06:56PM +0100, Pedro Lino wrote:
>>>  I'm wondering if I'm missing something or development really
>>>  stopped/slowed down since the 4.1.1 release?
>>>
>>
>> I can't speak for the others. But since the latest visible commit is
>> mine, I've been working more on the website in recent days.
>>
> 
> Actually my question was more in the sense "Am I looking at the right
> statistics?" because I find it hard to believe that with so much to be
> done and so many people participating, there hasn't been a code change
> in 7 days...

Actually, the problem is that there isn't so many people participating
in coding. Cloning http://git.apache.org/openoffice.git and running the
commands at the bottom of this message, gives of good overview of
code-contribution (as it does not include the websites). The answer to
your question might be that people at Hamburg are on Holidays.


openoffice.git]$ git shortlog --after={2013-09-17} -s -n 
   236  Herbert Dürr
   126  Armin Le Grand
   104  Oliver-Rainer Wittmann
    83  Andre Fischer
    74  Jürgen Schmidt
    47  Juergen Schmidt
    47  Steve Yin
    43  Tsutomu Uchino
    36  Ariel Constenla-Haile
    26  Pavel Janík
    24  Andrea Pescetti
    22  Yuri Dario
    11  Pedro Giffuni
     5  Jan Iversen
     4  Regina Henschel
     2  Clarence Guo
     2  Juan C. Sanz
     2  tal
     1  Kay Schenk
     1  Raphael Bircher
     1  Rob Weir


Including all branches:

openoffice.git]$ git shortlog --after={2013-09-17} -s -n --all
   311  Herbert Dürr
   158  Oliver-Rainer Wittmann
   153  Armin Le Grand
   119  Jürgen Schmidt
    97  Juergen Schmidt
    91  Andre Fischer
    85  Jan Iversen
    47  Steve Yin
    43  Tsutomu Uchino
    36  Ariel Constenla-Haile
    29  Andrea Pescetti
    26  Pavel Janík
    22  Yuri Dario
    11  Pedro Giffuni
     5  Clarence Guo
     5  Regina Henschel
     2  Juan C. Sanz
     2  tal
     1  Kay Schenk
     1  Raphael Bircher
     1  Rob Weir

All-time stats:

openoffice.git]$ git shortlog -s -n --all
   929  Herbert Dürr
   806  Andrew Rist
   679  Armin Le Grand
   539  Jürgen Schmidt
   408  Ariel Constenla-Haile
   404  Andre Fischer
   386  Oliver-Rainer Wittmann
   375  Jan Iversen
   353  Pedro Giffuni
   209  Liu Zhe
   175  Pavel Janík
    97  Juergen Schmidt
    94  Yuri Dario
    72  Michael Stahl
    72  Steve Yin
    70  Andrea Pescetti
    62  Eike Rathke
    44  Jian Fang Zhang
    43  Tsutomu Uchino
    35  Mathias Bauer
    34  Li Feng Wang
    33  Wang Lei
    31  Lei De Bin
    25  Jian Hong Cheng
    23  Zheng Fan
    17  Regina Henschel
    16  Zhe Wang
    14  Greg Stein
    13  Jianyuan Li
    13  Sun Ying
    11  Linyi Li
     9  Joe Schaefer
     8  Eric Bachard
     8  Maho NAKATA
     8  Rob Weir
     5  Alexandro Colorado
     5  Clarence Guo
     5  David Fisher
     4  Chen ZuoJun
     4  DongJun Zong
     4  Hongyun An
     4  Yong Lin Ma
     3  Damjan Jovanovic
     2  Dennis E. Hamilton
     2  Juan C. Sanz
     2  Raphael Bircher
     2  tal
     1  Albino Neto
     1  Kay Schenk
     1  Yang Shih-Ching
     1  Zhu Shan
     1  rcweir


Regards
-- 
Ariel Constenla-Haile
La Plata, Argentina

Re: Progress and Quality

Posted by Pedro Lino <pe...@gmail.com>.
Hi Rob


> You are focusing on security and exploits (which is obviously a very
> > important area). But I was thinking more in terms of program stability
> > *during* usage. I assume that Coverity's "project's defect density" would
> > reflect this?
> >
>
> The correlation is not clear.  I'd note, for example, that the Swiss
> Supreme Court gave a presentation recently where they said they prefer
> Apache OpenOffice over LibreOffice because of the greater stability of
> AOO.
>

I do too. That is why I'm curious about this.


> If I had to guess, what is probably true is that defect density in
> newly written code is correlated to real-world quality, as seen by
> users.   But 10-year old code?   Over a long period of time serious
> bugs of this kind -- crash bugs and other instability issues -- tend
> to be identified by users and are either fixed or at least well-known.
> We're unlikely to find new serious instabilities by examining ancient
> code.
>

Fair enough. That is mostly true for repeatable bugs. My expectation was
that this kind of analysis would spot those hard to find bugs that cause
unreproducible crashes...


> > So I would be more interested in running a debug build that could log
> these
> > occasional crashes (if they are not occasional and I can replicate them,
> I
> > create a regular Issuezilla bug report).
> >
>
> What OS are you running on?
>

Windows (XP Pro x86 and 7 Pro x64)

Regards,
Pedro

Re: Progress and Quality

Posted by Rob Weir <ro...@apache.org>.
On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 10:40 AM, Pedro Lino <pe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Rob
>
>
> Our main focus for finding latent security flaws has been via
>> "document fuzzing."  It is more complicated to set up than just
>> running a static analysis tool but since it involves probing the
>> actual running code it is more effective in many ways.  Historically
>> this is one of the primary ways that editors like OpenOffice are
>> exploited.    Also, when security researches report security flaws to
>> us, they are often flaws found from fuzzing.   I don't recall ever
>> seeing a report that was derived from static analysis.
>>
>
> You are focusing on security and exploits (which is obviously a very
> important area). But I was thinking more in terms of program stability
> *during* usage. I assume that Coverity's "project's defect density" would
> reflect this?
>

The correlation is not clear.  I'd note, for example, that the Swiss
Supreme Court gave a presentation recently where they said they prefer
Apache OpenOffice over LibreOffice because of the greater stability of
AOO.

If I had to guess, what is probably true is that defect density in
newly written code is correlated to real-world quality, as seen by
users.   But 10-year old code?   Over a long period of time serious
bugs of this kind -- crash bugs and other instability issues -- tend
to be identified by users and are either fixed or at least well-known.
We're unlikely to find new serious instabilities by examining ancient
code.

The other factor is the source of bugs.   Research has shown (general
academic research, not AOO specifically) that a large percentage of
bugs in software are introduced when fixing other bugs.  Whenever you
touch the code there is an opportunity for adding a new bug.   So I'm
not a big fan of changing thousands of lines of code based on static
analysis.  It can very well make the code less stable, not more.
Where we've used Coverity results it has been in a much more focused
way, looking for specific defects with impact.

>
>
>> If you want to read more about what we're doing with fuzzing you can
>> see my presentation from ApacheCon:
>> http://www.robweir.com/blog/publications/AOOFuzzing.pdf
>>
>> Also, if you are really interested in this area I can help you set up
>> a fuzzing environment.  It works best if you have a machine (or a VM)
>> your can dedicate to it for a couple of weeks .
>>
>
> Very interesting stuff. Actually the few times I had any problem with AOO
> usage was not while opening files. They happen during regular work sessions
> where Calc/Writer/Impress would freeze completely and leave no other choice
> other than killing soffice (with consequent data loss)
>
> So I would be more interested in running a debug build that could log these
> occasional crashes (if they are not occasional and I can replicate them, I
> create a regular Issuezilla bug report).
>

What OS are you running on?

Regards,

-Rob

> Regards,
> Pedro

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Re: Progress and Quality

Posted by Pedro Lino <pe...@gmail.com>.
Hi Rob


Our main focus for finding latent security flaws has been via
> "document fuzzing."  It is more complicated to set up than just
> running a static analysis tool but since it involves probing the
> actual running code it is more effective in many ways.  Historically
> this is one of the primary ways that editors like OpenOffice are
> exploited.    Also, when security researches report security flaws to
> us, they are often flaws found from fuzzing.   I don't recall ever
> seeing a report that was derived from static analysis.
>

You are focusing on security and exploits (which is obviously a very
important area). But I was thinking more in terms of program stability
*during* usage. I assume that Coverity's "project's defect density" would
reflect this?



> If you want to read more about what we're doing with fuzzing you can
> see my presentation from ApacheCon:
> http://www.robweir.com/blog/publications/AOOFuzzing.pdf
>
> Also, if you are really interested in this area I can help you set up
> a fuzzing environment.  It works best if you have a machine (or a VM)
> your can dedicate to it for a couple of weeks .
>

Very interesting stuff. Actually the few times I had any problem with AOO
usage was not while opening files. They happen during regular work sessions
where Calc/Writer/Impress would freeze completely and leave no other choice
other than killing soffice (with consequent data loss)

So I would be more interested in running a debug build that could log these
occasional crashes (if they are not occasional and I can replicate them, I
create a regular Issuezilla bug report).

Regards,
Pedro

Re: Progress and Quality

Posted by Rob Weir <ro...@apache.org>.
On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 6:06 PM, Pedro Lino <pe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Andrea
>
>
> Thank you for the quick answer.
>
>  I'm wondering if I'm missing something or development really stopped/slowed
>>> down since the 4.1.1 release?
>>>
>>
>> I can't speak for the others. But since the latest visible commit is mine,
>> I've been working more on the website in recent days.
>>
>
> Actually my question was more in the sense "Am I looking at the right
> statistics?" because I find it hard to believe that with so much to be done
> and so many people participating, there hasn't been a code change in 7
> days...
>
>
>>
>>  On a separate note, from a Quality perspective it would probably would be
>>> a
>>> good idea if Apache OpenOffice code was scanned by one of these Coverity
>>> analysis
>>>
>>
>> The Apache OpenOffice code is scanned by Coverity, and (since this is
>> considered security-relevant) data are privately accessible to some
>> developers.
>
>
> Is it possible to make public the "project's defect density" for Apache
> OpenOffice? I'm quite curious since I find AOO more stable than LO.
>
>
>
>> If I recall correctly (I've never seen them), most of the reports and
>> metrics did not seem very useful, since they included a lot of false
>> positives; one could silence those warnings by writing extra code or extra
>> assertions just to help the analyzer understand that nothing was wrong, but
>> this would be merely to please the analyzer and not to enhance the real
>> quality.
>
>
> That makes sense. But there are possibly some real leaks and bugs that
> could be attended...
>


Our main focus for finding latent security flaws has been via
"document fuzzing."  It is more complicated to set up than just
running a static analysis tool but since it involves probing the
actual running code it is more effective in many ways.  Historically
this is one of the primary ways that editors like OpenOffice are
exploited.    Also, when security researches report security flaws to
us, they are often flaws found from fuzzing.   I don't recall ever
seeing a report that was derived from static analysis.

If you want to read more about what we're doing with fuzzing you can
see my presentation from ApacheCon:
http://www.robweir.com/blog/publications/AOOFuzzing.pdf

Also, if you are really interested in this area I can help you set up
a fuzzing environment.  It works best if you have a machine (or a VM)
your can dedicate to it for a couple of weeks .


Regards,

-Rob


>
>> I haven't read the article you linked to yet, but if your point was
>> "Coverity should scan Apache OpenOffice" the answer is "This is already
>> happening".
>>
>
> Actually I meant some sort of scan, but since AOO is also scanned by
> Coverity then it would be interesting to know how the two compare.
>
> Regards,
> Pedro

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Re: Progress and Quality

Posted by Pedro Lino <pe...@gmail.com>.
Hi Andrea


Thank you for the quick answer.

 I'm wondering if I'm missing something or development really stopped/slowed
>> down since the 4.1.1 release?
>>
>
> I can't speak for the others. But since the latest visible commit is mine,
> I've been working more on the website in recent days.
>

Actually my question was more in the sense "Am I looking at the right
statistics?" because I find it hard to believe that with so much to be done
and so many people participating, there hasn't been a code change in 7
days...


>
>  On a separate note, from a Quality perspective it would probably would be
>> a
>> good idea if Apache OpenOffice code was scanned by one of these Coverity
>> analysis
>>
>
> The Apache OpenOffice code is scanned by Coverity, and (since this is
> considered security-relevant) data are privately accessible to some
> developers.


Is it possible to make public the "project's defect density" for Apache
OpenOffice? I'm quite curious since I find AOO more stable than LO.



> If I recall correctly (I've never seen them), most of the reports and
> metrics did not seem very useful, since they included a lot of false
> positives; one could silence those warnings by writing extra code or extra
> assertions just to help the analyzer understand that nothing was wrong, but
> this would be merely to please the analyzer and not to enhance the real
> quality.


That makes sense. But there are possibly some real leaks and bugs that
could be attended...


> I haven't read the article you linked to yet, but if your point was
> "Coverity should scan Apache OpenOffice" the answer is "This is already
> happening".
>

Actually I meant some sort of scan, but since AOO is also scanned by
Coverity then it would be interesting to know how the two compare.

Regards,
Pedro

Re: Progress and Quality

Posted by Andrea Pescetti <pe...@apache.org>.
On 16/09/2014 Pedro Lino wrote:
> I'm wondering if I'm missing something or development really stopped/slowed
> down since the 4.1.1 release?

I can't speak for the others. But since the latest visible commit is 
mine, I've been working more on the website in recent days.

> On a separate note, from a Quality perspective it would probably would be a
> good idea if Apache OpenOffice code was scanned by one of these Coverity
> analysis

The Apache OpenOffice code is scanned by Coverity, and (since this is 
considered security-relevant) data are privately accessible to some 
developers. If I recall correctly (I've never seen them), most of the 
reports and metrics did not seem very useful, since they included a lot 
of false positives; one could silence those warnings by writing extra 
code or extra assertions just to help the analyzer understand that 
nothing was wrong, but this would be merely to please the analyzer and 
not to enhance the real quality. I haven't read the article you linked 
to yet, but if your point was "Coverity should scan Apache OpenOffice" 
the answer is "This is already happening".

Regards,
   Andrea.

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