According to the definition of software quality given by french Wikipedia

An overall assessment of quality takes into account external factors, directly observable by the user, as well as internal factors, observable by engineers during code reviews or maintenance work.

I have chosen in this article to only talk about the latter. The quality of software and more precisely QGIS is therefore not limited to what is described here. There is still much to say about:

• Taking user feedback into account,
• the documentation writing process,
• translation management,
• interoperability through the implementation of standards,
• the extensibility using API,
• the reversibility and resilience of the open source model…

These are subjects that we care a lot and deserve their own article.

I will focus here on the following issue: QGIS is free software and allows anyone with the necessary skills to modify the software. But how can we ensure that the multiple proposals for modifications to the software contribute to its improvement and do not harm its future maintenance?

Self-discipline

All developers contributing to QGIS code doesn’t belong to the same organization. They don’t all live in the same country, don’t necessarily have the same culture and don’t necessarily share the same interests or ambitions for the software. However, they share the awareness of modifying a common good and the desire to take care of it.

This awareness transcends professional awareness, the developer not only has a responsibility towards his employer, but also towards the entire community of users and contributors to the software.

This self-discipline is the foundation of the quality of the contributions of software like QGIS.

However, to err is human and it is essential to carry out checks for each modification proposal.

Automatic checks

With each modification proposal (called Pull Request or Merge Request), the QGIS GitHub platform automatically launches a set of automatic checks.

Example of proposed modification

Result of automatic checks on a modification proposal

The first of these checks is to build QGIS on the different systems on which it is distributed (Linux, Windows, MacOS) by integrating the proposed modification. It is inconceivable to integrate a modification that would prevent the application from being built on one of these systems.

The tests

The first problem posed by a proposed modification is the following “How can we be sure that what is going to be introduced does not break what already exists?”

To validate this assertion, we rely on automatic tests. This is a set of micro-programs called tests, which only purpose is to validate that part of the application behaves as expected. For example, there is a test which validates that when the user adds an entry in a data layer, then this entry is then present in the data layer. If a modification were to break this behavior, then the test would fail and the proposal would be rejected (or more likely corrected).

This makes it possible in particular to avoid regressions (they are very often called non-regression tests) and also to qualify the expected behavior.

There are approximately 1.3 Million lines of code for the QGIS application and 420K lines of test code, a ratio of 1 to 3. The presence of tests is mandatory for adding functionality, therefore the quantity of test code increases with the quantity of application code.

In blue the number of lines of code in QGIS, in red the number of lines of tests

There are currently over 900 groups of automatic tests in QGIS, most of which run in less than 2 seconds, for a total execution time of around 30 minutes.

We also see that certain parts of the QGIS code – the most recent – are better covered by the tests than other older ones. Developers are gradually working to improve this situation to reduce technical debt.

Code checks

Analogous to using a spell checker when writing a document, we carry out a set of quality checks on the source code. We check, for example, that the proposed modification does not contain misspelled words or “banned” words, that the API documentation has been correctly written or that the modified code respects certain formal rules of the programming language.

We recently had the opportunity to add a check based on the clang-tidy tool. The latter relies on the Clang compiler. It is capable of detecting programming errors by carrying out a static analysis of the code.

Clang-tidy is, for example, capable of detecting “narrowing conversions”.

Example of detecting “narrowing conversions”

In the example above, Clang-tidy detects that there has been a “narrowing conversion” and that the value of the port used in the network proxy configuration “may” be corrupted. In this case, this problem was reported on the QGIS issues platform and had to be corrected.

At that time, clang-tidy was not in place. Its use would have made it possible to avoid this anomaly and all the steps which led to its correction (exhaustive description of the issue, multiple exchanges to be able to reproduce it, investigation, correction, review of the modification), meaning a significant amount of human time which could thus have been avoided.

Peer review

A proposed modification that would validate all of the automatic checks described above would not necessarily be integrated into the QGIS code automatically. In fact, its code may be poorly designed or the modification poorly thought out. The relevance of the functionality may be doubtful, or duplicated with another. The integration of the modification would therefore potentially cause a burden for the people in charge of the corrective or evolutionary maintenance of the software.

It is therefore essential to include a human review in the process of accepting a modification.

This is more of a rereading of the substance of the proposal than of the form. For the latter, we favor the automatic checks described above in order to simplify the review process.

Therefore, human proofreading takes time, and this effort is growing with the quantity of modifications proposed in the QGIS code. The question of its funding arises, and discussions are in progress. The QGIS.org association notably dedicates a significant part of its budget to fund code reviews.

More than 100 modification proposals were reviewed and integrated during the month of December 2023. More than 30 different people contributed. More than 2000 files have been modified.

Therefore the wait for a proofreading can sometimes be long. It is also often the moment when disagreements are expressed. It is therefore a phase which can prove frustrating for contributors, but it is an important and rich moment in the community life of a free project.

To be continued !

As a core QGIS developer, and as a pure player OpenSource company, we believe it is fundamental to be involved in each step of the contribution process.

We are investing in the review process, improving automatic checks, and in the QGIS quality process in general. And we will continue to invest in these topics in order to help make QGIS a long-lasting and stable software.

If you would like to contribute or simply learn more about QGIS, do not hesitate to contact us at [email protected] and consult our QGIS support proposal.

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

The launch of QField 3.0 was a big deal, but now we’re back to focusing on smaller, more frequent updates. Don’t let the shorter change log for 3.1 trick you – there are lots of cool new features in this update!

Main highlights

One of the main improvements in this release is the brand-new functionality to enable snapping to common angles while digitizing. When enabled, the coordinate cursor will snap to configured angles alongside a visual guideline. This comes in handy when adding new geometries while surveying features with regular angles (e.g. buildings, parking lots, etc.). As QField gets more digitizing functionalities, we’ve taken the time to implement a nifty UI that collapses digitizing toggle buttons into a drawer, leaving extra space for the map canvas to shine through.

In addition, the vertex editor - one of QField’s most advanced geometry tools - received tons of love during this development cycle, focusing on improving its usability. Changes worth mentioning include:

• A new undo button allows users to revert individual vertex manipulations in case of mistaken adjustment, which can save you from having to cancel a large set of ongoing manipulations;
• The possibility to select vertices using finger tapping on the screen, dramatically improving the user experience;
• Clearer on-screen markers to represent vertices and
• Tons of bug fixes to the vertex editor itself, as well as the broader set of geometry tools.

It is now possible to lock the geometry of individual features within a single vector layer. While QField has long supported the concept of a locked geometry state for vector layers, that was until now a layer-wide toggle. With the new version of QField, a data-defined property can dictate whether a given feature geometry can be edited. Interested in geofenced geometry editing? We’ve got you covered ;) This functionality requires the latest version of QFieldSync, which is available through QGIS’ plugin manager.

Noticeably improvements

Permission handling has been improved across all platforms. On Android, QField now delays the permission request for camera, microphone, location, and Bluetooth access until needed. This makes for a much friendlier user experience.

QField 3.0 was one of the largest releases, with major changes in its underlying libraries, including a migration to Qt 6. With the community’s help, we have spent countless hours testing before release. However, it is never a bulletproof process, and that version came with a few noticeable regressions. In particular, camera handling on Android suffered from upstream issues with Qt. We’ve tracked as many of those as possible, making this new version much more stable. One lingering camera issue remains and will be fixed upstream in the next three weeks; we’ll update as soon as it is available.

Finally, long-time users of QField will notice improvements in how geometry highlights and digitizing rubber bands are drawn. We’ve doubled down on efforts to ensure that the digitized geometries and the coordinate cursor itself are always clearly visible, whether overlaid against the canvas’s light or dark parts.

We want to extend a heartfelt thank you to our sponsors for their generous support. If you’re inspired by the developments in QField and want to contribute, please consider donating . Your support will help us continue to innovate and improve this tool for everyone’s benefit.

We’ve recently had the opportunity to implement a very exciting feature in QGIS 3.34 — the ability to load and view 3D content in the “Cesium 3D Tiles” format! This was a joint project with our (very talented!) partners at Lutra Consulting, and was made possible thanks to a generous ecosystem grant from the Cesium project.

Before we dive into all the details, let’s take a quick guided tour showcasing how Cesium 3D Tiles work inside QGIS:

What are 3D tiles?

Cesium 3D Tiles are an OGC standard data format where the content from a 3D scene is split up into multiple individual tiles. You can think of them a little like a 3D version of the vector tile format we’ve all come to rely upon. The 3D objects from the scene are stored in a generalized, simplified form for small-scale, “zoomed out” maps, and in more detailed, complex forms for when the map is zoomed in. This allows the scenes to be incredibly detailed, whilst still covering huge geographic regions (including the whole globe!) and remaining responsive and quick to download. Take a look at the incredible level of detail available in a Cesium 3D Tiles scene in the example below:

Where can you get 3D tile content?

If you’re lucky, your regional government or data custodians are already publishing 3D “digital twins” of your area. Cesium 3D Tiles are the standard way that these digital twin datasets are being published. Check your regional data portals and government open data hubs and see whether they’ve made any content available as 3D tiles. (For Australian users, there’s tons of great content available on the Terria platform!).

Alternatively, there’s many datasets available via the Cesium ion platform. This includes global 3D buildings based on OpenStreetMap data, and the entirety of Google’s photorealistic Google Earth tiles! We’ve published a Cesium ion QGIS plugin to complement the QGIS 3.34 release, which helps make it super-easy to directly load datasets from ion into your QGIS projects.

Lastly, users of the OpenDroneMap photogrammetry application will already have Cesium 3D Tiles datasets of their projects available, as 3D tiles are one of the standard outputs generated by OpenDroneMap.

Why QGIS?

So why exactly would you want to access Cesium 3D tiles within QGIS? Well, for a start, 3D Tiles datasets are intrinsically geospatial data. All the 3D content from these datasets are georeferenced and have accurate spatial information present. By loading a 3D tiles dataset into QGIS, you can easily overlay and compare 3D tile content to all your other standard spatial data formats (such as Shapefiles, Geopackages, raster layers, mesh datasets, WMS layers, etc…). They become just another layer of spatial information in your QGIS projects, and  you can utilise all the tools and capabilities you’re familiar with in QGIS for analysing spatial data along with these new data sources.

One large drawcard of adding a Cesium 3D Tile dataset to your QGIS project is that they make fantastic 3D basemaps. While QGIS has had good support for 3D maps for a number of years now, it has been tricky to create beautiful 3D content. That’s because all the standard spatial data formats tend to give generalised, “blocky” representations of objects in 3D. For example, you could use an extruded building footprint file to show buildings in a 3D map but they’ll all be colored as idealised solid blocks. In contrast, Cesium 3D Tiles are a perfect fit for a 3D basemap! They typically include photorealistic textures, and include all types of real-world features you’d expect to see in a 3D map — including buildings, trees, bridges, cliffsides, etc.

What next?

If you’re keen to learn even more about Cesium 3D Tiles in QGIS, you can check out the recent “QGIS Open Day” session we presented. In this session we cover all the details about 3D tiles and QGIS, and talk in depth about what’s possible in QGIS 3.34 and what may be coming in later releases.

Otherwise, grab the latest QGIS 3.34 and start playing…. you’ll quickly find that Cesium 3D Tiles are a fun and valuable addition to QGIS’ capabilities!

Our thanks go to Cesium and their ecosystem grant project for funding this work and making it possible.

We have been continuing our work with the Flagship sponsor of QGIS – Felt to develop their QGIS Plugin – Add to Felt  that makes it even easier to share your maps and data on the web.

What is the ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin?

The ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin is a powerful tool that empowers users to export their QGIS projects and layers directly to a Felt web map. This update introduces two fantastic features:

1. Single Layer Sharing: You can now share a single layer from your QGIS project to a Felt map. This means you have greater control over which specific data layers to share, allowing you to tailor your map precisely to your audience’s needs.
2. Map Selection: With the updated plugin, you can choose which map on Felt to add your layer to – a new map, or an ongoing project. This flexibility simplifies your workflow and ensures that your data ends up in the right place.

Businesses that rely on QGIS love how these new features provide a seamless way to view and share results, ultimately allowing them to move more quickly and stay in sync:

“Felt helps us keep each other updated on what we’ve done, what we’ve modeled, how things are progressing.” – ICON Engineering

Why is this Update Important?

Web maps are invaluable tools for sharing data with a wider audience, be it colleagues, clients, or the public. They provide creators with the ability to control data visibility, display options, and audience access, all within an easily shareable digital format. However, creating web maps can be an arduous and complex task.

Here’s where the ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin update comes to the rescue:

1. Streamlining the Process: Creating web maps traditionally involves website development, data hosting, and map application development—tasks that require a diverse skill set. This complexity can be a significant barrier, especially for smaller operations with limited resources or budget constraints.

2. Felt Simplifies Web Mapping: Felt makes it effortless to create web maps, and share them as easily as you would a Google Doc or Sheet. Simply drag and drop your data, customize the symbology to your liking, and share the map with a link or by inviting collaborators. No need to send large data files or answer questions about the map’s data sources.

3. Integration with QGIS: Now, the ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin bridges the gap between QGIS and Felt. It seamlessly imports your QGIS data into Felt, eliminating the need for manual data transfers and reducing the complexity of web map creation.

In essence, the ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin update simplifies the process of sharing and collaborating on web maps. It empowers users to harness the full potential of web-based mapping, making it accessible to everyone, regardless of their technical expertise. The update makes it even easier to share progress updates or model re-run outputs without creating a new map, or sharing a new map link.

So, if you’re a QGIS user looking to enhance your map-sharing capabilities and streamline your workflow, make sure to take advantage of this fantastic update. Say goodbye to the complexities of web map creation and hello to effortless, data-rich web maps with Felt and the ‘Add to Felt’ QGIS Plugin.

How to install and upgrade

• Open QGIS on your computer. You must have version 3.22 or later installed.
• In the plugins tab, select Manage and Install Plugins.
• Search for the ‘Add to Felt’ plugin, select and click Install Plugin.
• Close the Plugins dialog. The Felt plugin toolbar will appear in your toolbar for use.
• Sign into Felt and begin sharing your maps to the web.

If you want more features in this plugin, let us know or you’re interested in exploring how a QGIS plugin can make your service easily accessible to the millions of daily QGIS users, contact us to discuss how we can help!

Growing up, I would spend hours lost in National Geographic maps. The feeling of discovering new regions and new ways to view the world was addictive! It’s this same feeling of discovery and exploration which has made me super excited about Soar’s Digital Atlas. Soar is the brainchild of Australian, Amir Farhand, and is fuelled by the talents of staff located across the globe to build a comprehensive digital atlas of the world’s maps and images. Soar has been designed to be an easy to use, expansive collection of diverse maps from all over the Earth. A great aspect of Soar is that it has implemented Strong Community Guidelines and moderation to ensure the maps are fit for purpose.

Recently, North Road collaborated with Soar to help facilitate their digital atlas goals by creating a QGIS plugin for Soar. The Soar plugin allows QGIS users to directly:

• Export their QGIS maps and images straight to Soar
• Browse and load maps from the entire Soar public catalogue into their QGIS projects

There’s lots of extra tweaks we’ve added to help make the plugin user friendly, whilst offering tons of functionality that power users want. For instance, users can:

• Filter Soar maps by their current project extent and/or by category
• Export raw or rendered raster data directly to Soar via a Processing tool
• Batch upload multiple maps to Soar
• Incorporate Soar map publishing into a Processing model or Python based workflow

Soar will be presenting their new plugin at the QGIS Open Day in August so check out the details here and tune in at 2300 AEST or 1300 HR UTC. You can follow along via either YouTube or Jitsi.

Browsing Soar maps from QGIS

One of the main goals of the Soar QGIS plugin was to make it very easy to find new datasets and add them to your QGIS projects. There’s two ways users can explore the Soar catalog from QGIS:

You can open the Soar Browser Panel via the Soar toolbar button  . This opens a floating catalog browser panel which allows you to interactively search Soar’s content while working on your map.

Alternatively, you can also access the Soar catalog and maps from the standard QGIS Data Source Manager dialog. Just open the “Soar” tab and search away!

When you’ve found an interesting map, hit the “Add to Map” button and the map will be added as a new layer into your current project. After the layer is loaded you can freely modify the layer’s style (such as the opacity, colorization, contrast etc) just like any other raster dataset using the standard QGIS Layer Style controls.

Sharing your maps

Before you can share your maps on Soar, you’ll need to first sign up for a free Soar account.

We’ve designed the Soar plugin with two specific use cases in mind for sharing maps. The first use case is when you want to share an entire map (i.e. QGIS project) to Soar. This will publish all the visible content from your map onto Soar, including all the custom styling, labeling, decorations and other content you’ve carefully designed. To do this, just select the Project menu, Import/Export -> Export map to Soar option.

You’ll have a chance to enter all the metadata and descriptive text explaining your map, and then the map will be rendered and uploaded directly to Soar.

All content on the Soar atlas is moderated, so your shared maps get added to the moderation queue ready for review by the Soar team. (You’ll be notified as soon as the review is complete and your map is publicly available).

Alternatively, you might have a specific raster layer which you want to publish on Soar. For instance, you’ve completed some flood modelling or vegetation analysis and want to share the outcome widely. To do this, you can use the “Publish dataset to Soar” tool available from the QGIS Processing toolbox:

Just pick the raster layer you want to upload, enter the metadata information, and let the plugin do the rest! Since this tool is made available through QGIS’ Processing framework, it also allows you to run it as a batch process (eg uploading a whole folder of raster data to Soar), or as a step in your QGIS Graphical Models!

Some helpful hints

All maps uploaded to Soar require the following information:

• Map Title
• Description
• Tags
• Categories
• Permission to publish

This helps other users to find your maps with ease, and also gives the Soar moderation team the information required for their review process.

We’ve a few other tips to keep in mind to successfully share your maps on Soar:

• The Soar catalog currently works with raster image formats including GeoTIFF / ECW / JP2 / JPEG / PNG
• All data uploaded to Soar must be in the WGS84 Pseudo-Mercator (EPSG: 3857) projection
• Check the size of your data before sharing it, as a large size dataset may take a long time to upload

So there you have it! So simple to start building up your contribution to Soar’s Digital Atlas. Those who might find this useful to upload maps include:

• Community groups
• Hobbyists
• Building a cartographic/geospatial portfolio
• Education/research
• Contributing to world events (some of the biggest news agencies already use this service i.e. BBC)

You can find out more about the QGIS Soar plugin at the QGIS Open Day on August 23rd, 2023 at 2300 HR AEST or 1300 HR UTC. Check here for more information or to watch back after.

If you’re interested in exploring how a QGIS plugin can make your service easily accessible to the millions of daily QGIS users, contact us to discuss how we can help!

Years ago, the QField community and its users showed their love for their favourite field app by supporting a successful crowdfunding to improve camera handling.

Since then, OPENGIS.ch has continued to lead the development of QField with the regular support of sponsors. We couldn’t be prouder of the progress we have made, with plenty of new features added in every major release. This includes major improvements to positioning including location tracking, integration of external GNSS receivers through not only Bluetooth but TCP/UDP and serial port connections, accuracy indicator and constraints, and most recently sensors reading to list a few.

We are now calling for the community to help further better QField and unlock an important milestone: background location tracking service.

Pledge now

Main goal: background location tracking on Android – 25'000€

Currently, QField requires users to keep their devices’ screen on and have the app in the foreground to keep track of the device’s positioning location. On mobile devices, this can drain batteries faster than many would want to, in environments where charging options are limited.

This crowdfunding aims at removing this constraint and allow QField - via a background service - to constantly keep tracking location even while the device is suspended (i.e., when the screen is turned off / locked).

To achieve this, a significant amount of work is required as the positioning framework on Android will need to be relocated to a dedicated background service. Recent work we’ve done adding a background service to synchronize captured image attachments in QFieldCloud projects armed us with the assurances that we can achieve our goal while giving us an appreciation of the large amount of work needed.

Some of the benefits

Running out of battery is the nightmare of most field surveyors. By moving location tracking to a background service, users will be able to improve their battery life considerably and keep focusing on their tasks even if it involves switching to a different app.

Furthermore, while OPENGIS.ch ninjas remain busy squashing reported QField crashes all year long, there will always be unexpected scenarios leading to abrupt app shutdowns, such as third-party apps, systems running out of battery, etc. To address this, the background service framework will also act as a safeguard to avoid location data loss when QField unexpectedly shuts down and offer users means to recover that data upon re-opening QField.

Stretch goal 1: background navigation audio feedback 5'000€

The second stretch goal builds onto QField’s nice fly-to-point navigation system. If the QField community meets this threshold, a new background navigation audio feedback informing users in the field of their proximity to their target will be implemented.

The audio feedback will use text-to-speech technology to state the distance to target in meters for a given time or distance interval.

Stretch goal 2: iOS 15'000€

The main goal will cover the Android implementation only. Due to being a very low level work we will have to replicate the work for each platform we support. If we reach stretch goal 2 we will also implement this for iOS.

Pledge now:

In case you do not see the embedded form you can open it directly here .

Thanks for supporting our crowdfunding and keep an eye on our blog for updates on the status.