Bjorn Freeman-Benson reaches the last installment of his six-part series on the lessons the Eclipse team learnt from the Callisto Simultaneous Release Project. In part 6, Bjorn explains how they solved the problem of bugs arising in the ‘in-betweens’.

Bjorn says that when the Eclipse Planning Council first announced that ten projects were going to do a simultaneous release, almost all projects wanted to be involved. The PR value of being part of Callisto was pre-destined to be enormous and everyone wanted to be part of it. However, no one wanted to take time off their own projects to test others.

He explains that each project’s schedule was tight, but someone should have stepped up to the challenge of testing the in-betweens for bugs – those that do not appear when individual projects are loaded, but appear when two projects are active at the same time.

One solution to the problem was to provide the Callisto Great Bug Contest to encourage cross-project testing. “The contest has been a partial success - finding bugs that might otherwise have been missed - but we'll need a less haphazard, more complete story for Europa (next year's simultaneous release),” Bjorn says.