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Difference between revisions of "Lightning Retrospective Guide"

(BIRT)
(BIRT)
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* Convert folder plugin to single-jar plugin
 
* Convert folder plugin to single-jar plugin
 
* Plugin versioning: use 4 digit build number; specify ranges when requiring plugins; upgrade version number only when the plugin has a change
 
* Plugin versioning: use 4 digit build number; specify ranges when requiring plugins; upgrade version number only when the plugin has a change
There were many adjustments because of participation in the simultanious release. We really learned a lot of things from Callisto. Here I must apologize for MIA in Callisto final release. I make a big mistake on release time. I confused by the time difference and took for June 30th (Shanghai time) as the release date. And at the same time we met uploading issue that day. The real problem is I didn't seek appropriate help from appropriate person, and didn't notify Callisto release team about it. It is the worst day since I became a build engineer. You can image when you open your eyes, there are so many emergency emails and calls from HQ. Oh, it's too bad. So I promise it will never happen again.
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There were many adjustments because of participation in the simultanious release. We really learned a lot of things from Callisto. Here I must apologize for MIA in Callisto final release. I made a big mistake on release time. I confused by the time difference and took for June 30th (Shanghai time) as the release date. And at the same time we met uploading issue that day. The real problem is I didn't seek appropriate help from appropriate person, and didn't notify Callisto release team about it. It is the worst day since I became a build engineer. You can image when you open your eyes, there are so many emergency emails and calls from HQ. Oh, it's too bad. So I promise it will never happen again.
  
  

Revision as of 01:24, 9 September 2006

This page provides both a sample of a good retrospective and a natural place to add your retrospective for the Europa Build Workshop. You won't need to make slides to present at the workshop. We'll provide access to these pages and a big font.

(your project name here)

Describe yourselves, your project and your relationship to other developers on the team. Consider describing ...

  • years of experience in development, doing release engineering, and specifically building Eclipse projects.
  • how you work, on a good day, or on a not so good day. how does your work change as you ramp-down toward release.
  • what automation you use and how often you change it. how late in a project you would consider automation changes and how you would know that they work.


Describe your Callisto experience. Consider describing ...

  • special adjustments you made because of your participation in the simultanious release.
  • tactical communication regarding inbound and outbound bits.
  • strategic communication with respect to the Callisto planning team.


Describe your hopes and ambitions for Europa. Consider describing ...

  • facilities you wish you had and how they might work and who you would trust to build them.
  • precedures that would make your life less stressful or more efficient. also when and how you would escape those precedures in an emergency.
  • communication mechanisms that would support both routine and exceptional circumstances that are sure to arise as more projects join the release train.


Eclipse Foundation / IT

I'd like to offer a retrospective from the Foundation's point-of-view, as we were heavily involved in (and impacted by) the actual release. These are some observations we wrote down:

  • Having all the mirrors ready for the release saved us tens of thousands of dollars in bandwidth and server resources.
  • The last minute builds introduced big delays. How can we avoid this?
  • Communication: we need key contacts for each project (perhaps two) with Instant Messenger and cell phone access.
  • We need a way to test the download experience from a user's point-of-view before going live. Wayne was able to wing this with Callisto, but a better, broader process is needed.
  • Birt: the Birt build team went MIA for a while, which introduced delays.
  • How to withdraw a project: what happens if, for some reason, a project cannot commit to the release at the very last minute?
  • Backup for final build/release: we had a hard time reaching David Williams during the final Daze, as he was stuck on a plane. No one else knew what magic he needed to perform to promote everything to a state of readiness.
  • Releasing on a friday afternoon before a long weekend (in Canada/USA) is boring (IMHO)


Eclipse Top-Level Project (Platform,JDT, PDE & Equinox)

Platform-releng-europa-blurb


BIRT

I have been BIRT build & release engineer for a year. Another member of BIRT release team is Xiaoying Gu. She joined the team half a year ago. We both have no build experience and Eclipse project experience before.

BIRT haven't use PDE build to build BIRT. We have our own build framework, written in Ant. We write build script for each BIRT plugin, and it will be invoked by top-level build script. Plugin build script is maintained by plugin owner. Top-level build scripts are maintained by build team. The build system usually works well. But there are three shortages in our build system:

  • A gap between development environment and build environment. Developers works in Eclipse workbench, but we build under Ant. There is the gap naturally. It causes many troubles, so we are working hard to get rid of the gap by “Eclipse Way”.
  • Low efficiency. It will take 3 hours to make one build before, now 2 hours, but we still want to make it faster.
  • Hard to build BIRT. Top-level build scripts are not checked into CVS because the build framework is not designed for open source to some extent.

We have close relationship with other developers on the team. Following are our responsibilities:

  • Top priority task: provide daily build to QAs and developers. Without it they can't begin their work.
  • Help developers when they need to add a new plugin to BIRT daily build, help them to solve plugin build script issue. Run test builds to make sure the changes will not break next build.
  • Maintain feature structure
  • Coordinate cross team build tasks
  • Monitor rolling build, once there is a compilation error, notify developer to fix it, thus avoid to break next day's daily build
  • Run regression test after daily build is ready
  • Optimize our build framework


Callisto experience

  • Use manifest in BIRT plugin
  • Convert folder plugin to single-jar plugin
  • Plugin versioning: use 4 digit build number; specify ranges when requiring plugins; upgrade version number only when the plugin has a change

There were many adjustments because of participation in the simultanious release. We really learned a lot of things from Callisto. Here I must apologize for MIA in Callisto final release. I made a big mistake on release time. I confused by the time difference and took for June 30th (Shanghai time) as the release date. And at the same time we met uploading issue that day. The real problem is I didn't seek appropriate help from appropriate person, and didn't notify Callisto release team about it. It is the worst day since I became a build engineer. You can image when you open your eyes, there are so many emergency emails and calls from HQ. Oh, it's too bad. So I promise it will never happen again.


Europa Ambitions

  • Switch to PDE build to build BIRT. This means we will rewrite our build system. And the whole build system will be available in CVS. It is a big challenge for us. Hope to learn the best practices for PDE build.


Facilities I wish we had

  • Efficient and stable upload tool
  • Web page for new eclipse projects on suggested best practices for build

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