As you may or may not know, the Eclipse community has come around to the idea that all projects should produce plans (go figure) and that these plans should be in a common form. This is goodness all around.

Consumers (or worse, potential consumers) have a really hard time understanding what is going on in all the different projects if they plans are spotty and are structured differently. Standardized/required plans help.

To give the community a high-level view of what is happening at Eclipse, we produce a Roadmap (here is the 2007 Roadmap). Producing this document is a whole lot easier and the result a whole lot better if there is a standard and machine processable plan for every document. Another bonus.

Developers are notoriously lazy (that’s a good thing). Having a standard plan structure makes it really easy for me (uhhh, some project lead…) to snag/reuse whole plan sections like the milestone dates from another project. My goodness, why didn’t we do this sooner?!

There is no free lunch. Teams with existing plan practices will need to change a bit and teams that don’t currently produce plans, well, get with the program!

Oh, and yes, there is a deadline. Projects should have their plans available in the standard form linked from their project metadata (project leads, see your portal pages) by the end of September. You have about 3 weeks.

Confused? Not sure what this is all about? See the helpful wiki page on project plans and the even more helpful page on Eclipse development resources. Or talk to your project lead/PMC members. Surely they know what is going on…

Tags: eclipse, syndicate