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Summarize the major features of this
release as well as any other features that have generated significant
discussion amongst the community during the development cycle. Compare the
features against the Roadmap to understand the project's conformance or
divergence.
Reason: The community will use this
release and the ecosystem will build products on top of this release, and both
need to know what features were included or excluded.
Summarize the state of the non-code
aspects of the release including: user documentation,
localization/externalization, examples, tutorials, articles, and so on. Have
the existing artifacts been updated? Are there new artifacts? Have the obsolete
ones been retired or at least marked as pertaining only to older material?
Reason:
The non-code aspects are essential for the wide-spread adoption of the
release.
Certify that the APIs in this release
are
Eclipse Quality.
The project lead will personally certify that the requirements for quality
have been met and/or discuss any deficiences.
Reason:
Eclipse members build commercial tools on top of the extensible frameworks and
thus the quality of the APIs is extremely important.
Summarize the architectural quality of
the release. Discuss the intrinsic nature of being extensible
embodied by this project. Discuss issues such as unresolved overlap with other
projects, unpaid "merge debt" from incorporating various components,
and so on.
Reason: Eclipse members build commercial
tools on top of the extensible frameworks and thus the quality of the
architecture is important.
Summarize the usability of the tools.
Usability in this sense is about using the tools to solve development
problems, not the more academic sense of UI evaluation/testing.
Reason:
Without usable tools, the project will not attract the user community necessary
to enable the ecosystem.
Summarize the features (APIs and any
significant user features) from previous releases that are being end-of-life'd
in this release. End of life includes both deprecation and actual
removal.
Reason: The community builds products that rely on
features and so they need to know when these features are changing.
Summarize the bugzilla situation. How
many bug records (defects and enhancements) have been
opened/closed/deferred/new, etc? How many P1, P2, ..., bug records are
outstanding?
Reason: Summaries of the bugzilla records offer
a glimpse into the project productivity. They also offer an estimate of the
outstanding risk. And the summary is used to alert the community to known
issues.
Summarize the standards compliance of
this release. If the features are based on defined, pending, or ad-hoc
standards, what is the state of those standards and what is the state of the
support for those standards in this release.
Reason: Eclipse
is about building frameworks and tools based on standards, so we need to make
sure that we are conforming to the appropriate standards.
Summarize the user interface usability
and the conformance to the
Eclipse User Interface Guidelines.
Include section 508 compliance, language pack conformance (does the code
support multiple languages), etc. Explain any deviations from the user
interface guidelines and standards.
Reason: The user
community is larger than just mouse-wielding, English-speaking, computer
jockeys. We need to support that larger community.
Discuss the initial schedule and any
changes to the schedule over the course of the release, i.e., what the project
team achieved. Discuss whether milestones were met or slipped. Reason:
The community relies on consistent schedules from Eclipse so that projects and
products can plan for the correct dependencies.
Summarize the project's development of
its three communities. Consider the interactions on bugzilla, the mailing
lists, the newsgroups, public conference calls, blogs, PR activities, code
camps, conference tutorials, coordinating with other Eclipse projects and
other open source projects (Apache, ObjectWeb, etc), ...
Reason:
It is important for Eclipse projects to build a community around the project,
not just deliver code for a project. This review item is about the success of
building a community.
The EMO explicitly asks during the
Release Review if any Member would like to assert that this release infringes
their IP rights. If so, the EMO and the project will follow the Eclipse IP
Policy in discussions with that Member.
Reason: One of the
important benefits that the Eclipse Foundation provides for its members is the
consistent application of the
Eclipse IP Policy
which helps ensure (but does not guarantee) that the framework and tools are
useable in commercial products.
If there is a Project Plan (full or
even a draft) for the next release, the final issue to cover in the Release
Review is the unveiling of the new plan.