Why Practices?

Practices enable a compositional approach to building methods. This approach offers the following benefits:

• Adaptability and scalability
• Incremental adoption
• Easy to configure and use
• Community development

Adaptability and Scalability

Practices can be adapted to support a range of solutions. In particular, practices can be adapted to suit your organization and supplemented by your own practices.

The core practices are based on a common framework that allows them to be composed.  These core practices are tool-agnostic, low-ceremony practices that can be extended to address a broad variety of development concerns, such as SOA, geographical distribution, model-driven architecture and embedded systems. Tool and technology specific guidance can be added, such as guidance on J2EE, and a variety of development tools. Some of these extensions can be quite modest, adding for example just tool specific guidance to existing tasks, while others can be comprehensive, defining processes that provide a radically expanded scope with new or altered artifacts, new or altered tasks, and new or altered roles.

Extensions and additions to the practices can be:

• used internally by an organization
• open source as a part of the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF) project
• made freely available outside the open source licenses of Eclipse (EPL)
• sold commercially as an extension to the basic framework, such as the IBM(R) Practices.

Incremental Adoption

Each practice is described as a standalone capability that can be adopted by an organization or project. Each practice may include enablement materials that explain how to get started.  

Easy to Configure and Use

Creating a method is as simple as selecting the practices that you wish to adopt, and then publishing the results. Each practice adds itself into the framework so that content can be viewed by practice, or across practices by work product, role, task and so on.

Community Development

Since a practice can be easily authored on its own, practices are ideal for community development. The basic agile practices for the EPF Practices are, in fact, developed by the Eclipse Process Framework community.