Our application is guided by a seriers of guidelines, these are not as strict as the [Eclipse House Rules] which result in bug reports.

Sensible Defaults:

• application is "user friendly", make the right choices rather than complicate matters

Code for Convenience:

• this system is designed to be extended by others.
• principle of "least surprise" applies to developers as well as users

Code like you mean it:

• this project is on a short timeline, don't waste time in "Analysis Paralysis". We are developers if we change our mind we can change our code.
• There is time enough for the codebase to be entrenched later

Other things that you woudl normally expect to see in this list are covered by 07 Eclipse Preferences, using the code formatter to supply file headers and that sort of thing.

Warnings

This is not so much a guideline as a common mistake.

Eclipse RCP Guideline:

• Anything that references a resource is not intended for RCP developers because of the extra code and dependencies on workspaces it pulls in. So if you see the org.eclipse.core.resources plug-in in your dependency list, or see an import for some class from that package, you're probably doing something wrong.