KOffice - We Have a Plan

At the end of November, the KOffice developers met in Oslo for their semi-annual developer sprint. You have probably read some of the many blog entries from that meeting or read some of the news articles that Jos Poortvliet wrote on the dot.

Many things were discussed during the meeting, and one of them is how we can make KOffice mature enough for real users. If you have followed KOffice development, you have probably noticed that in all our release announcements, the latest of them for KOffice 2.1, we always labeled KOffice as not yet ready for real production usage. This is now about to change.

It has long been our hope that KOffice 2.2 should be ready for the end users. Until the sprint, it wasn't very clear what that actually meant. What we did at the meeting was to formulate a plan for what End User Readiness really means and how we will achieve it.

At the KOffice wiki, there is a page which describes what we are going to do. Basically we will use the plan that Krita came up with and use it for KWord, KSpread and KPresenter: Target the application for one specific user and make it perfect for him/her. Then hope that it's good enough for other users as well.

The target users had to be users whose needs are pretty simple. KOffice has a good base to build on, but is still lacking a lot of features. We can't do everything at the same time, so what we have to do is to identify which features to do first and implement them so they are mature. So here is the plan, as described on the wiki page:

1. We will find so called Target Users for each of KWord, KSpread and KPresenter.
2. These target users will define some Use Cases that are valid for them. These use cases should be rather simple.
3. From the use cases, the developers will define which Features the applications have to support to be able to allow the users to achieve their goals in the use cases.
4. Finally we will keep track of Bugs and Wishes (new features) that have to be fixed or implemented for the features to work.

We have found target users for all of the applications. Notice that none of the target users, except me, is actually a developer. I would be happy if we could find somebody else than myself as the target user for kspread, and will accept volunteers gladly.

Not all target users have written down their usecases yet, and not all use cases have been transformed into features yet, but now starts the work. This page will be a living document, and will guide us over the months to come.

At the same time, we have a gracious offer from Thomas Pfeiffer (colomar) to work with us. Thomas is an interface design expert and has previously worked with Amarok. I hope that he will not find us too difficult to work with over the upcoming months.

Last, but not least, we will also try to make the libraries of KOffice stabilized so that outside developers can write extensions without having to worry about them becoming incompatible with future versions. Wish us luck!