2023.09 Graduation/Progress Review

The Eclipse ESCET project requests a combined progress and graduation review:

• We became an Eclipse Foundation project in 2020 (see creation review). The initial contribution was done later that year. We had our first release in 2021. We believe we now satisfy the criteria to leave the incubation phase.
• Our last release review was over a year ago, but the next release (v1.0) is not ready yet. Therefore, a progress review makes more sense at this moment than a release review.
• We believe that it makes sense to combine the graduation review with a progress review, as there is considerable overlap (the Eclipse Foundation Project Handbook mentions this as being a logical combination as well).

Regarding the progress review, please see the information from our last release review:

• https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/technology.escet/reviews/0.6-release-review
• https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipse/escet/escet/-/issues/338
• https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipsefdn/emo-team/emo/-/issues/331

Regarding the graduation review. We will address each of the 4 requirements listed in Section 6.3.2 of the Eclipse Foundation Project Handbook:

1. A working and demonstrable code base of sufficiently high quality.
   • We have a working code base, and have had so since before the project joined the Eclipse Foundation in 2020.
   • The quarterly Eclipse ESCET releases that we made since we joined the Eclipse Foundation are being used in academia (in student courses, graduation projects, etc), by industry, and by the larger community.
   • We perform extensive code reviews on all merge requests. We have an extensive test suite, that runs automatically during the build.
   • We have a code style. We check that partially automatically within our Eclipse development environments when we make changes (Eclipse JDT and Checkstyle). We also have various automatic checks during our build.
   • Our user-facing APIs (like the CIF modeling language) are quite stable. We take great care in being backwards compatible. For instance, we don't just remove language and tool features, but deprecate them and only remove them years later. The release notes provide evidence of this.
2. Active and sufficiently diverse communities appropriate to the size of the graduating code base: Adopters, Developers, and users.
   • When the project joined the Eclipse Foundation, we had 3 committers, and now we have 5 committers. Only two committers are from the same organization.
   • The number of non-committers involved in the project is growing. From the information on GitLab issues and merge requests (snapshot 2023-08-08), where I considered the current committers as committers also before they became committers:
     
   • The current registrations for our next community meeting (31 so far) already surpasses the number of participants that joined the previous edition.
   • We continuously work on growing the community, for instance through our user community meeting, by being present at conferences, through publications, and so on.
3. Operating fully in the open following the principles and purposes of Eclipse.
   • We communicate via the escet-dev list, and via the Eclipse ESCET GitLab instance. Both are public and hosted by the Eclipse Foundation.
   • We had a community meeting last year. It was open to all. It was announced on our escet-dev list. The minutes of the meeting were posted after the event on the dev-list as well.
   • The next community meeting is on September 26, 2023. It is again open to all, and has again been announced on our the escet-dev list.
   • Contributors that have shown sufficient merit get invited to become committers (see also point 2 above). We have documented the criteria in our documentation.
4. A credit to Eclipse and is functioning well within the larger Eclipse community.
   • We believe we have a well-functioning project.
   • Where possible and relevant, we collaborate with other projects. For instance, with the Dash license check tool project (see e.g. here), the Tycho project (see e.g. here and here), and the JDT project (see e.g. here).
   • Furthermore, we join general community discussions (see e.g. here and here).