[news.eclipse.technology.epf] EPF 1.2 Released!

["Per Kroll" <pkroll@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I want to congratulate the team to yesterday's release of EPF 1.2, which you 
can download on
http://www.eclipse.org/epf/downloads/tool/epf1.2.0_downloads.php
and invite the broader community to leverage all of the hard work.

- EPF 1.2 contains 2 components: OpenUP 1.0 and EPF Composer 1.2.
- 29 committers and 13 contributors built the product.
- 631 bugs and enhancements were done to EPF Composer, and 416 bugs and 
enhancements to OpenUP.

EPF Composer 1.2 - New Features and Key Improvements
- Improved Diagram Editor
    - Diagram editor has been completely reimplemented.
    - Provides swimlanes, control flow labels, free-form drawing, and font 
styles.
    - Files can be saved in GIF, JPG, or BMP format.
Improved Rich Text Editor
    - Font family and size can be changed.
    - Content cut from Microsoft Word can be pasted as plain text.
    - Links and images can be added in the HTML view.
    - Improved HTML error markers and correction features.
Improved Configuration Editor
    - Processes can be fine-tuned by adding or removing categorized 
elements.
    - Improved configuration error reporting for Method Configurations and 
Method Libraries.
    - Current view is highlighted in configuration editor.
    - Configuration views can be ordered.
Improved Process Editor
    - Activities are displayed with indented and outdented elements.
    - All tasks at any level can be suppressed.
    - Activities can have multiple descriptors.
Additional platform support
    - Vista
    - Internet Explorer 7
    - Mozilla FireFox 2
    - Subversion
    - Eclipse 3.3
Other Improvements
    - New plug-in naming convention allows plug-ins to be displayed in 
hierarchical lists.
    - Published sites on application servers can implement server-based 
search.
    - GUIDs are no longer present in published filenames.
    - A new variability type is provided: Extends and Replaces.
    - Elements in categories can be ordered alphabetically, manually, or by 
type.

OpenUP 1.0 - Key Characteristics
- Scope: OpenUP aims at being minimal and complete, focusing on only 
fundamental content required for a development process that can be used 
as-is for specific contexts. This means that we have on purpose de-scoped 
many content areas, including environment, advanced configuration 
management, GUI prototyping, database refactoring, and model-driven 
development, among others. Those and many other content areas may later be 
added as plug-ins extending OpenUP. While de-scoping we have ensured that 
the resulting process is complete enough to be applied by a team to build a 
software application.
- Field testing: OpenUP captures the vast experience of its authors on real 
projects and borrows from many different processes, including IBM Rational 
Unified Process, other variants of the Unified Process, DSDM, XP, Scrum, 
Eclipse Way, Agile Model-Driven Development, and the experience of 
contributors from a broad cross-section of environments. The content of 
OpenUP 1.0 has been written from scratch to provide a concise and well 
integrated process that takes an integrated, team-based and stakeholder 
focused approach that provides a fresh perspective on software development. 
OpenUP is stable enough to be used as is by project teams, and it will 
continue to evolve as teams adopt it and provide feedback.
- Extensibility: Customizations via extensibility (plug-ins) are encouraged 
to ease maintenance when new versions of OpenUP are released. However, we 
expect to change the structure of process elements in OpenUP for the next 
release to address scalability. This could mean that some restructuring of 
your plug-in may be required after OpenUP has been refactored.
- Consistency: OpenUP has been collectively written by many people from a 
dozen or so organizations. However, we have firmly pursued consistency in 
style of writing and depth of content through copy-editing, published 
authoring guidelines and extensive reviews.

This is a major step forward for the EPF project. We have something to be 
very proud over!

Looking forward, we brainstormed yesterday about future potential 
enhancements, and it is obvious that we have many potential exciting things 
to work on, including:
- Leverage Wiki technology
- Release Scrum 1.0
- Release XP 1.0
- Refactoring and broadening of OpenUP content
We invite you and your friends and colleagues to work on these and many 
other exciting capabilities moving forward.

Again, we hope you will enjoy the hard work of the team!

Per Kroll
Project Lead: Eclipse Process Framework