Agile, open source, distributed, and on-time - inside the Eclipse development process

Summary form only given. Eclipse is a widely recognized open source project dedicated to providing a platform for developing integrated tools. Throughout the history of Eclipse the development team was successful in hitting projected delivery dates with precision and quality. This isn't possible without a team strongly committed to ship quality software. How is this really done? How does Eclipse achieve quality and just-in-time delivery? This paper sheds light on the key practices of the Eclipse development process - from the development mantras "always beta", "milestones first", "API first", and "performance first" to practices such as ensuring quality through multiple feedback loops. The author reflects on proven practices for managing a large project performed by geographically dispersed teams and open source contributors in a highly competitive market. Most of these practices have evolved in the open source project, but they are equally applicable to closed source projects and help to improve quality, timeliness and reduce development stress in both types of environments.