Development Process 2006 New Incubation

Project Lifecycle

Strike through means striked from original, underlined means new.

Projects go through sixseven distinct phases. The transitions from phase to phase are open and transparent public reviews.

Pre-proposal - An individual or group of individuals declares their interest in, and rationale for, establishing a project. The EMO will assist such groups in the preparation of a project Proposal.

• The Pre-proposal phase ends when the Proposal is published by EMO and announced to the membership by the EMO.

Proposal - The proposers, in conjunction with the destination PMC and the community, collaborate in public to enhance, refine, and clarify the proposal. Mentors for the project must be identified during this phase.

• The Proposal phase ends with a Creation Review Proposal Review or a Termination Review.

Proposal review - The reviews are not described in the original project lifecycle, it is added here anyway for providing info about the purpose of this review. The proposal review checks whether the proposal is in compliance with the Eclipse Bylaws and if the required number of Mentors have been found.

Proposal Validation - After the proposal has been accepted for validation, the purpose of the proposal validation phase is to establish a basic (documented) architecture and to validate this architecture with a working implementation. The proposal team should make all planed code contributions available during proposal validation. It should be able to instantly use the code contributions. The contributions need to be worked to eclipse quality requirements (tests, api, documentation) during Proposal Validation. The proposers need to create an easily consumable build of the implementation. As there are legal requirements for ip compliance at Eclipse.org, I propose that we use an infrastructure (e.g. from a partner) where the code can live, where we do not have the ip compliance requirement. Eclipse.org would provide newsgroup, mailing list and web space during proposal validation, but the sources and builds would be provided from a different site. IMPORTANT: Mentors would be available to the proposers in the proposal validation phase, but we would not speak of an Eclipse project at this phase.

• The Proposal Validation phase ends with a successful Creation Review or a Termination Review.

Incubation - After the project has been created, the purpose of the incubation phase is to establish a fully-functioning open-source project. In this context, incubation is about developing the process, the community, and the technology. Incubation is a phase rather than a place: new projects may be incubated under any existing Top-Level Project.

• The Incubation phase ends with a successful Graduation Review or a Termination Review.
• The Incubation phase may continue with a Continuation Review.
• Top-Level Projects cannot be incubated and can only be created from existing Mature-phase Projects.

Many Eclipse Projects are proposed and initiated by individuals with extensive and successful software development experience. This document attempts to define a process that is sufficiently flexible to learn from all its participants. At the same time, however, the Incubation phase is useful for new Projects to learn the community-defined Eclipse-centric open source processes.