Eclipse/Mars Retrospective

This page captures notes for the Mars retrospective to be discussion at one of our Eclipse project weekly architecture call.

Suggested improvements for Neon

• Ensure all tests are executed by the Gerrit build trigger (Lars)
• Review days for projects in which the focus is on reviewing community patches (Lars)
• Use test day only for testing - no last minute commits (Dani)
• Analysis/investigation, design decision etc. should always be part of bug reports, so that others can follow (Dani)
• Have a dedicated team member (on rotation) look at test failures and make sure they get fixed for the next I-build at the latest (Dani)
• Have a dedicated team member (on rotation) look at the inbox (Dani)
• Component leads update the status wiki page in the interest of saving time for others during the Architecture call (Dani)
• Some components like resources or text have very little activity, maybe combine them with other projects to reduce the overheard? (Lars)

Retrospective

Platform UI / Lars

• What went well:
  • Lot of onboarding of new committers.
  • Code cleanup and updates of plug-ins to Java 7.
  • Gerrit build trigger includes more tests.
  • Critical functionality like customize perspective dialog were fixed.
  • E4 tooling were migrated to platform.

• What didn't:
  • Error reports from Marcel were not really used.
  • Platform tests not working well with GTK3 SWT made it harder to run them locally on Ubuntu 14.04.
  • Gerrit patch for JDT UI to show annotations in Outline view was not reviewed.

Releng

• What went well:

• What didn't:

Debug/ Ant

• What went well:
  • Inbox tracked, items delivered as per the plan
  • Build and Test results tracked and attended

• What didn't:
  • Last minute checkin does create confusion like Nashorm Debugging bug

JDT Core

• What went well:
  • New Owner for Formatter and a brand new and much improved formatter
  • Wider adoption of Gerrit among team members

• What didn't:
  • At times there was not enough communication with respect to review requests, thus resulting in bugs being left out of releases at last minute
  • Several new test failures in areas where no changes were made. Most due to short-comings of test frameworks and took significant amount of time early during the release.

JDT UI

• What went well:
  • Quality of N&N has improved, less correction to be made (Note: There is still room for improvement in terms of incomplete info, clean up)
  • Build failures, test failures, attended to quickly, didn't have many long standing failures

• What didn't:
  • High DPI work didn't start soon enough, didn't have time to address all the issues. Should address the remaining concerns earlier in this release.

PDE

• What went well:
  • Lars coming in with contributions and proactively which is helping PDE's cause.
  • Migration of the E4 project wizard to e4

What didn't:

• • Lot of things got moved out of plan. Needed to have planned moving out of release rather than moving iteration
  • Less expertise in PDE build causing issues in junit failures.

SWT

• What went well:

• What didn't:

Dani

• What went well:
  • Delivered all milestones and RCs on time.
  • Builds went well and we had continuous and fast response to build issues.
  • Lots of achievements/deliverables despite a smaller team.
  • Team and cross-component interaction went well.
  • Architecture call was reasonable short and only used for mostly good discussions.

• What didn't:
  • Sometimes decisions made in bugs not explained in a way that non-team members can understand it.
  • Bugzilla inbox list is growing in some components, too many open items to be triaged/addressed.
  • Tests for some components sometimes fail for days without interaction.
  • Had an M5a again after a one year pause ==> use test day only for testing - no last minute commits.
  • Component leads should update status wiki page in the interest of saving time for others during the Architecture call.