Eclipse/Mars Retrospective

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

Each component should add its items to this page.

Platform UI

• 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

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.
  • Gerrit patch to show annotations in Outline view was not reviewed

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:
  • Analysis/investigation, design decision etc. should always be part of bug reports, so that others can follow.
  • 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.