LibreOffice: cleaning and re-factoring a giant code-base

" summary

An account of how the LibreOffice team updated a 25-year-old, poorly documented, German-commented codebase with tangled build infrastructure and no unit tests by building an international developer team and performing large-scale refactoring rather than rewriting. Discusses specific practices and tooling for tracking progress (bug metrics, regression counts), risky refactoring to pay down technical debt, and the resulting quality, feature and platform improvements delivered in LibreOffice 4.0, plus how others can get involved.

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