Eclipse's success has become boring. And that's a problem.
I can't think of another organization (or company) that has shipped successfully every year for 13 years using a world-wide distributed team of hundreds of developers–that has a perfect 13 year track record.
So let's learn from Eclipse. Can Eclipse's success be duplicated in a commercial environment? My experience is that the answer to this question can be a resounding “YES!”
Several years ago I had the privilege of serving on the Eclipse Platform project for two years as we developed the Eclipse Databinding framework.
Immediately after this experience, I had the privilege of working with another organization on an Agile project. Drawing on Eclipse's success, we decided to intentionally adopt what we could from Eclipse's own processes.
This new commercial project experienced similar success to Eclipse itself. In five years of development, after a year of team building and process refinement we achieved four years of perfectly-scheduled production releases (delivered on a six-week schedule) with only a single emergency patch release over the lifetime of the project.
How did Eclipse do it? How did we do it? What are the main lessons we learned from Eclipse that enabled us to achieve similar success?
In my next blog post I'll outline the main values we took from the Eclipse organization that I feel enabled us to replicate Eclipse's success.