Going the Eclipse way

Why should we discuss the "Eclipse way" in the chapter serving as an introduction to Jazz and Rational Team Concert.

Eclipse is a software development environment comprising an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and an extensible plug-in system. Initially it was perceived as a Java IDE, a Rich Client Platform (RCP), and a Tool Integration Platform. However, in time Eclipse transformed as an eco-system of platform, application frameworks, tools, and runtimes.

Note

Eclipse is a universal tool platform— an open, extensible IDE for anything and everything, but nothing in particular.

The Eclipse team always worked on small, stable, and extensible features, and delivered the quality software on time. The team developed, used, and improved the Eclipse by constantly reviewing and listening to the feedback from the community. They incorporated the best practices from eXtreme Programming (XP), Scrum, and (Rational Unified Process) RUP .

The Eclipse team took the best practices and modified or adapted them when necessary. The team followed the incremental, iterative, collaborative, transparent, and customizable practices, which enabled them to scale-up in time.

The Eclipse way is very often described by the set of practices (in the previous figure) that made Eclipse an extensible, robust, intuitive, and high quality platform. Very importantly, having the community involvement, consuming our own output, always having a customer, and adaptive planning are the key success factors. This ultimately reduces stress on the team and thereby leads to higher productivity.

Along with the focus on coding, the team also puts in place the release plans, iteration plans, and test plans. Planning gives the team certainty, predictability, and a sense of general direction. With Eclipse, it was possible to improve the individual coding productivity. It gave the developers all the tools necessary to deal with the common and boring tasks such as stub generation, renaming, importing and extracting code, file search, and others. As a developer you want to concentrate on the challenging stuff rather than boring tasks.

The team took the Eclipse's experiences and best practices to build the Jazz platform and Rational Team Concert. These best practices—often called the Eclipse way— helped the Jazz team to concentrate on to the team productivity, collaboration, and process awareness.