Minutes of Requirements Council Meeting

Boston, MA
Tuesday, August 24, 2005

Attendees

Present


Regrets

Paul Clenahan

Bjorn Freeman-Benson


Boris Kapitanski

Anurag Gupta

John Kellerman


Georg Lenz

Martin Klaus

Philip Ma


Mike Norman

Mike Milinkovich

Karl Reti



James Saliba

Melissa Traynor



Karl Frank






Agenda

Here were the main discussion topics, as distributed prior to the meeting:

Quality

The Requirements Council approved the draft Guidelines without modification.

Roadmap Process

Progress Review from 2005 Roadmap

The Requirements Council reviewed the themes and priorities approved for 2005 and gave the following assessment of progress.

Progress made:

No progress made, but high hopes for 2006:

Disappointment continues:

2006 Roadmap Process

First, there was a general consensus that the themes and priorities established in last year's process are expected to continue “as is”.

In looking ahead to the 2006 Roadmap process, the requirements council observed that the process was low on precision. For example, there was a great deal of effort in creating the themes, but relatively little focus on prioritization. To help address this, this time around:

  1. Each RC member will assign Bugzilla bug #’s to each line item in their RC input.

  2. The RC will attempt to prioritize the input it provides to the AC and PC. (This will be an experiment, success TBD.)

There was a great deal of discussion on how to best track the requirements council inputs in Bugzilla. The alternatives discussed included:

  1. modifying Bugzilla so that we could directly assign themes to bugs;

  2. implementing a separate requirements tracking system and link it to Bugzilla; and

  3. try a simple hack on Bugzilla to track the bugs with a minimal amount of infrastructure support

In the end, the decision was made to pursue the third option. To that end, for each theme, we will create an email list with digest entitled eclipse.org-theme-theme_name@eclipse.org. Then each bug will be annotated to put the themes mail id into the cc field for the various bugs that map to the theme. (This would be done by a mix of people, including Council members and project folks.) People interested in the progress on a particular theme can either subscribe to the mail list or read the digest. A similar approach could also be used for bugs which are of particular interest to particular companies

It should be possible to also create BIRT reports which query Bugzilla for particular email addresses in the cc field and report by status

The remainder of the meeting was spent on reviewing the requirement inputs from the council members. A consolidated list of these requirements is below.