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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 (note: compare against the Project Plan section as the forward looking sections apply to the next release). References to existing New & Noteworthy documentation is a useful addition to this summary. 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. (See the Eclipse Quality APIs document for more discussion.) The project's Architecture Council representative will personally certify that the requirements for quality have been met. 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 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.
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 conformance to the Eclipse Development Process. Has this release been developed using open, transparent, and inclusive processes?  Has this release followed its charter principles?  Consider the use of bugzilla, the mailing lists, the newsgroups, conference calls, committer elections/removals, 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 process of building the community.
Summarize the project's development of its community. 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.
As per the Eclipse IP Policy, the project verifies that:
... that the about files and use licenses are in place
... all contributions (code, documentation, images, etc) have been committed by individuals who are either Members of the Foundation, or have signed the appropriate Committer Agreement. In either case, these are individuals who have signed, and are abiding by, the Eclipse IP Policy.
... that all significant contributions have been reviewed by the Foundation's legal staff.
... that all non-committer code contributions, including third-party libraries, have been documented in the release and reviewed by the Foundation's legal staff
... that all contribution questionnaires have been completed
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.