Lightning Retrospective Guide

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-releng-europa-blurb