When we talk about an office suite, in the first place, the usual thing is that the Microsoft suite comes to mind, Office, with applications that are a benchmark such as Word, Excel or PowerPoint. However, if we don’t want to pay to use them, we can always find other free and open source alternatives as substitutes. Here, its main rival is none other than LibreOffice , which manages to offer a quality office suite without going through the box. In return, it is possible to collaborate with your development and we have different ways to help improve the application.
Before a new version of this office application is officially released, it needs to go through a series of preliminary tests in order to detect any important errors before its launch. By downloading and testing its trial versions, it will be possible to do our bit to make LibreOffice establish itself as a reliable and secure suite.
LibreOffice, a constantly growing office suite
LibreOffice is a free and open source office suite, which is based on OpenOffice, but adding additional features, such as better compatibility with its namesake Microsoft Office tools and regular updates. This suite is developed and maintained by The Document Foundation , born as a result of the original OpenOffice project. In it we can find a word processor, a spreadsheet program, as well as software to design slides and make presentations.
Its developer, The Document Foundation, are constantly working to improve all the features of their office suite. To do this, it periodically incorporates new functions and features. In this way it manages to position itself as the best free alternative to Microsoft Office. This is achieved by offering all the tools we need to be able to work with it in our day to day life. As we are talking about an application that is characterized by being open source, users can choose to actively participate in its development. Thus, we can help by conducting tests in order to improve the quality of it.
Quality control improvements
If we use LibreOffice on a regular basis and are willing to spend part of our time helping to make this free office suite ever more powerful and able to stand up to Microsoft’s Office, we can help by testing versions in development . This is something that can be done without having to be a technician or a programmer. Well, our mission should be focused on error information, by conducting tests and versions in the development phase of LibreOffice.
To carry out this important work, LibreOffice developers make a series of tools available to users who want to collaborate. Through these, it is possible to test and detect faults, to later report them. For this, it has the Quality Control section, which we can access from this link to the developer’s own website .
From here we can see the different methods to collaborate with the development of LibreOffice. For example, bug reports are created through “BugZilla”. Also “TesLink” is used to carry out manual tests of the life cycle of a software, using for it from the simplest tests to the most complicated ones. To help detect errors, the best way is through development versions. In them we find pre-release versions , the daily builds that are produced daily for testing purposes, as well as the source code that is hosted in a git repository. Through its use and testing of features, we can detect errors that we will later send to its developers so that they can correct them before it is officially released.
