8.4. Distilled

• Agile software development is a general name for a family of related methodologies that emphasize empowering the programmer through small self-organizing teams, close collaboration with customers, use of iterative development cycles, and continuous unit testing and integration by the developers.

• Projects are guided by two-level planning: a coarse-grained release plan and a fine-grained iteration plan.

• Eclipse provides a development platform that supports and accelerates the agile development cycle and that may be radically customized through plug-in contributions.

• Five agile development practices are especially relevant to programming in Eclipse: testing, refactoring, continuous integration, collective ownership, and coding standards.