StAC 09 Resource Planning

This page is to capture the brainstorming and prioritization process for the StAC's recommendations on how best to allocate a small budget on the theme of "Improving the release Train".

High Level Guidelines

These are suggested guidelines to help with decision making.

• Focus on efforts that deliver direct improvements, not on efforts that merely deliver a list of things to do that we may or may not have resources to act on.
• Focus on efforts that represent gaps in skills and abilities/availability of the Eclipse Foundation and the Projects

High Level Brainstorming

• Continuous testing infrastucture for Packages (currently only SDK does CIT)
• Usability Studies of packages
• High Production quality videos/media showing out of the box use of popular packages
• Improving user experience finding, getting, installing and first using the packages (based on popular)
  • Separating the various packages (JEE, EMF, etc) and offering individualized download pages, details, experiences for each
• Turning packages into first class distros
• Integration testing - testing of GUI continuity and polish across projects. There are many problems that only arise when multiple projects are combined together. For example, two projects may contribute a menu or preference page with the same name, use the same key bindings or mnemonic, use the same end user terminology for different concepts, or use different end user terminology for the same concepts. These problems do not become apparent when each project does its own testing, but arise when unrelated projects are packaged together. It would be helpful to have a resource that is installing different combinations of projects and reporting bugs for issues, and/or working with the User Interface Best Practices Working Group to settle cosmetic differences and create a more seamless end user experience. Many of these problems are easy to fix once identified, and can greatly improve initial end user experience.