Opportunities in the EPF community

The Eclipse Process Framework (EPF) is an open source community that depends solely on the active participation of its user community to produce process content and tools. There are a variety of ways to participate in the development and deployment of EPF, depending on your interest and skill level.

• If all that you want to do is ask a few questions to get started, sign up for the EPF Newsgroup (more information follows).
• If you want to participate in discussions and decisions about the content and direction of EPF, sign up for the epf-dev mailing list.
• Use Bugzilla to get your hands dirty by reporting bugs and enhancements, verifying the correctness of method content, or submitting method content to address process issues.
• Participate at the highest levels by joining technical and committee meetings. These meetings are where detailed process issues and product strategy are discussed.

Everyone who downloads or uses EPF content is encouraged to participate at some level. EPF is only as good as the quality of the participation of its contributors.

EPF newsgroup

The EPF Newsgroup is the place to ask and answer questions about OpenUP, EPF Composer, and other EPF processes. Most of the traffic involves how to use EPF Composer, EPF Practices, and OpenUP. It's monitored by the community, and you can access it as you do any newsgroup. Everyone who uses EPF will benefit from the support it offers and by receiving announcements. Sign up for the newsgroup now.

EPF-dev mailing list

The epf-dev mailing list is used by the EPF development community to communicate and discuss development issues. Sign up for the mailing list to participate in technical discussions and receive meeting announcements.

Bugs, enhancements, and process content

Bugzilla is the tool used to track changes and tasks for EPF. Bugzilla is the Work Items List for the EPF project and contains the requirements, enhancements, bugs, to-do items, and so forth for the project. Anyone in the community is invited to report bugs and enhancements, to provide content addressing the bugs and enhancements, and to help validate that the content is correct. You can provide content simply by adding an attachment to any Bugzilla entry.

Learn how to use Bugzilla change requests for EPF.

Content can be submitted as text files or exported from EPF Composer as plug-ins or XML. Edit the latest version of the libraries by downloading them from the CVS in EPF Composer. Set up EPF Composer to download the practices library by following the instructions on the EPF Composer Development Guide. Note that only committers can commit changes to the CVS. Any changes made by contributors must be attached to a Bugzilla entry.

Meetings and committees

There are numerous meetings every week to discuss progress and define solutions. The EPF Calendar is open to everyone and lists all upcoming meetings (teleconferences and face-to-face). Participate in these meetings to dive deeply into issues by collaborating directly with other members of the community. Although everyone is welcome to attend these meetings, it's generally expected that participants will, at some point, take responsibility for some tasks. Note: The EPF Calendar is within a Yahoo Group (eclipseprocessframework group), and you need to join that group to access the calendar.

The calendar and the epf-dev newsgroup also announce the EPF committee meetings. Currently, these are held quarterly in both North America and Europe. This is the highest level of participation, where committers and contributors make critical decisions about EPF projects. Everyone from the community is welcome, and attendees are expected to participate in discussions and take on responsibility for addressing aspects of the EPF.