Join the Qt Fix and Polish Week

Originally we thought the title should be Qt Bug Fixing week, but that would have been too simple.
Here at Digia, we always work to deliver the best Qt releases that we can. We work to fix as many bugs as possible, while still progressing and implementing new features. We try to please everyone and get the balance right.
However, sometimes it's important to focus. For the week of the 15th to the 22nd of September, we decided we'll step away from other tasks and take a fresh look at some outstanding issues. We will focus on three areas:

• Bugs
• Examples
• Auto Tests

Qt has a great community that likes to know what's going on and get involved! Instead of only keeping our efforts behind closed doors, we invite everyone to participate. We will coordinate most of the work through IRC (we'll start #qt-bugs on freenode) and hope to get many P1s out of the way for Qt 5.4.

People working in the Digia offices will team up and focus on these projects:

Bugs

One thing we don't do enough during normal development and bug fixing is actually taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture. We try to get an overview of the bug situation before each release, and hope to catch all issues that would be show stoppers, and prevent regressions as much as possible. This will be an early round for Qt 5.4.

In order to get an overview, we'll create JIRA filters and share them to classify bugs and decide what's important and where we need to focus our efforts. One improvement that we'll be implementing is the closing of old issues, which was decided upon at the last Qt Contributors' Summit in Berlin. After weeding out and agreeing on which bugs are most important for us to fix, we in Digia will focus on getting those bugs fixed. This is a great opportunity to start contributing to Qt by fixing your own pet peeve. We invite anyone to join, and will help them to get started fixing their highest priority issues.

Examples

We also have a long list of issues when it comes to examples. We will take out the magnifier and get the pixels aligned, make colors harmonize and finally ensure that more examples work well on all platforms. We have quite a few examples that work well on desktop, but not always so much on mobile platforms. If you have a keen eye for details, here's your opportunity to join and help make Qt shine.

Auto Tests

We spend a lot of time getting the continuous integration system that Qt uses, to be in good shape. One thing that is frustrating to everyone contributing to Qt is that some tests are unreliable. We call them "flaky" because on a good day they'll just work and everything is fine. But when they have a bad day and the moon is full they turn into real blockers. That can be caused by timing issues, relying on a certain order of things to happen or other obscure circumstances. We don't like to admit it, but some tests for Qt are not optimal. If we spend time on cleaning up tests, we increase the general speed of getting patches into Qt which leads to a higher pace in development.

Time and Date

We'll start Monday the 15th of September in the morning (Europe time) and announce the results on Monday 22nd of September.