Refactoring LibreOffice

The FOSDEM 2013 talks are up now, and this one of LibreOffice Refactoring really hit an interesting mark. The LibreOffice team has been aggressively rebuilding a culture of rapid change as a road to quality, bringing in a test and test automation culture, and leaving nearly no parts of the code as sacred.

It’s interesting that LibreOffice seems to be doing a much better job than OpenOffice at removing technical debt. I think we’re already seeing the effect of that cultural split, and I expect that in the future this is going to get far more obvious.

I can’t wait to get the Android remote working for future presentations. Will be a lot of fun to drive my presentations that way.

2 thoughts on “Refactoring LibreOffice”

  1. One thing I think kills Linux projects (and Windoze and Apple apps) is destroying workflows. Something’s upgraded, and now you have to find out where they hid the brake pedal. Rapid changes for quality that gore every sacred cow is fine as far as upsetting “technical debts”, but is the steering wheel in the same place?

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  2. I think refactoring for technical debt is completely orthogonal to UI and User Experience changes. Having attempted, and failed, to write a python extension for OpenOffice 3 years ago, I’m very happy to see these kinds of internals changes going on.

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