It always comes as a surprise to people when I tell them that we at the Eclipse Foundation don’t consider anything that we distribute to be a product. It’s a surprise, because basically everybody in the world thinks that the Eclipse IDE is a product and has thought that way for most of the last fifteen years. We’re starting to come around.
With the Mars release, we started an Every Detail Matters initiative which was intended in part to started filling some important holes in our product story. This took the form of a new installer, some user experience improvements, better dissemination of product information (e.g. an proper new and noteworthy document), the automatic error reporter, and more.
We’re going to do more with the Every Detail Matters for Neon, introducing some bigger improvements in the overall user experience, from when the user first hits our website through to the creation their first “Hello World” application.
I’m pretty excited about what we’re doing, and I’m especially excited to be talking about it at EclipseCon 2016. Here’s the abstract for my talk titled “Let’s Treat Eclipse Neon More Like a Product“:
Every year, the Eclipse simultaneous release brings together the hard work of dozens of open source projects into a single coordinated release. But you probably already know that. You probably already live that.
While most Eclipse committers don’t tend to think of the simultaneous release as a product, most of our users do. For millions of software developers, the the installer and many flavours of Eclipse IDE are products. While it’s important that we carefully manage expectations, it’s also important that we understand and respect the expectations of our massive user community.
We’ll start this session with a quick overview of where we are now with regard to Eclipse-as-a-product and survey the current state of the Eclipse user experience. We’ll discuss some of the little things that project teams can do to improve the user experience, how we fit product features into our project structure, how we improve our support channels, and how to tap into the funding available to work on Eclipse IDE improvements.
There’s all sorts of related content in the conference sessions,and opportunities to get involved in the process. Be sure to visit me at the Hackathon.
