The great thing about Eclipse is that architecturally, thanks to the amazing SWT framework that IBM created, Eclipse provides a native experience on your OS of choice. But last April, when I moved my primary OS to the Windows 7 RC, I noticed two things. The first was a feeling reminiscent of when I first started using Windows XP early 2001. Windows 7 was slick, responsive, and brought the desktop client to a new level of refinement. The second observation was that Eclipse and Tasktop, which I spend the majority of my time in, looked like dated Windows XP applications.

Today we’re happy to announce that Tasktop is working with Microsoft to help make Eclipse look and feel like an exemplary Windows 7 application. It is great to see Microsoft supporting this effort, since it will impact a broad range of users of the Eclipse IDE, as well users of commercial Eclipse-based IDEs such as the SpringSource Tool Suite IDE, and Eclipse RCP applications such as Tasktop Pro for Windows. Read more about the Microsoft initiative behind this on Vijay Rajagopalan’s post on the Microsoft Interoperability blog.

The majority of Eclipse’s current Windows 7 interoperability comes from the previous efforts of the Eclipse SWT teams and from the backwards compatibility of Windows 7. So you can happily run Eclipse on Windows 7 today. This allows us to focus entirely on leveraging the new features in Windows 7 and on look-and-feel enhancements. Here are a couple of highlights of the initial scope of the effort. Note that all contributions will be made to Eclipse.org under the EPL.

Taskbar Progress (Eclipse bug 293228)

Windows 7 provides a new visual representation of progress on taskbar icons. This feature removes the need to Alt+Tab to an application just to check on the status of a long-running job, such as a download. The plan is to integrate this with Eclipse progress in order to allow some key jobs, such as a full builds and runtime launches, to indicate their status on the taskbar. We already have a working prototype of this functionality, which I’ll show later today when I arrive at Eclipse Summit Europe.

Taskbar Jump Lists (Eclipse bug 293229)

The redesigned Windows 7 taskbar allows applications to expose frequently used features or files. We plan to incorporate this with Eclipse commands and actions that will benefit from quick taskbar based access.

We have some additional enhancements planned, including updating the widget colors and styling to match the Windows 7 look. SWT walks a very careful line in terms of leveraging native widgets, following accessibility guidelines and using desktop themes. Enhancing that experience would not be possible without the technical expertise of the Microsoft Windows and Eclipse SWT teams, whom we have to thank for the high quality Eclipse on Windows experience that we have today. Thanks to this new open source collaboration, what we’ll soon have is the icing on that cake.

If you’re interested in tracking progress, or chiming in with what else you would like to see implemented to streamline the Eclipse experience on Windows 7, refer to Eclipse bug 293226 and its subtasks.

Today’s releases of Tasktop Pro 1.6 and Eclipse Mylyn 3.3 represent a major step forward in the maturation of the task-focused interface. Mylyn has become the de facto framework for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) integrations for Eclipse with an ecosystem that now includes 42 connectors. The Mylyn Connector Discovery mechanism that was released with Eclipse 3.5 Galileo makes it trivial to find and install connectors, helping users and encouraging the number of integrations to grow. The Tasktop Certified connector program has been a key enabler for enterprise adoption of Mylyn by ensuring the quality and compatibility of integrations that exist outside of the Eclipse Mylyn project. We are not done yet. But between the evolution of the framework, the size of the integration ecosystem, and the new features that we’re announcing today, I’m happy to say that support for task management has been established as the critical link between the ALM systems and the IDE.

The goal of the Mylyn project is to provide a task management framework and reference implementations for open source ALM technologies. Tasktop’s goal is to extend the reach of the productivity benefits of Mylyn to as many developers as possible, by integrating with commercial ALM systems and providing additional task-focused collaboration facilities. The very broad adoption of our technology is riding on the wave of the spread of Agile and Lean development processes, which make tasks a more explicit part of the development process. We have seen significant innovation around Agile ALM tool support from companies such as Atlassian, CollabNet, Danube, IBM, Microsoft, Rally and ThoughtWorks Studios. We’re continuing to see increasing usage of open source solutions like Bugzilla, Mantis and Trac. And with the input of broad enterprise adoptions of Tasktop Pro, such as Nokia’s, we have tailored this new task management layer of the IDE to make it easy for organizations adopting Agile to make the most of their ALM tools and get the dramatic productivity benefits of task-focused collaboration.

 
The Agile ALM Communication Disconnect

To realize the promised returns of an agile approach to development, developers must embrace the agile tool support they are using as their hub for communication and collaboration around code. However, developers can be resistant to adopting a tool that is not integrated with their working environment. Developers are all already experiencing a high level of overload, and agile tools introduce yet another inbox to track. The result is an anti-pattern of stories, subtasks and status being updated at the end of a sprint or release instead of as the changes happen. Or trying to figure out how much time was spent on a task two weeks ago when submitting timesheets.

This manual approach to ALM updates challenges the benefits of agile, because it results in ongoing friction for developers and a lack of useful visibility for product owners and management. Further developer frustration can occur when expectations that were assumed to be clear are not met. As developers, we want priorities to be clear and explicit and progress to be evident, since it makes it much easier to get things done, and to say “no” when yet another feature or enhancement is suggested. Managers need progress and priorities to be explicit in order to steer the product and features to meet users’ needs. To get the full benefits of agile, a new tool automation layer is needed to connect user stories and requirements at the project management level with the delivery happening at the developer level. We call this the “task management” layer of the agile development process.

 
Introducing the Agile Task Management Layer

This ALM communication disconnect is addressed by the agile task management layer in the development tool stack. The role of this layer is to organize work around tasks that represent actual development activity, automatically link related artifacts to tasks, and provide automation for updating ALM systems for real-time project visibility.

Within this layer, Mylyn provides the task management APIs that integrate the IDE with the various ALM systems in play. Tasktop and Mylyn connectors provide the integrations with a team’s tools for change management, source code configuration management, build and release management, and test and quality management. Tasktop 1.6 completes the layer by automating the linking and tracking of task across the very wide variety of commercial and open source ALM tools.

 
What’s new in Tasktop 1.6 and Mylyn 3.3?

Welcome Experience - Tasktop 1.6 includes a new welcome screen that introduces task-focused productivity features and settings step-by-step, making it easy to get started with the basics and then take advantage of Tasktop’s more advanced capabilities.

Task Federation – Teams with multiple ALM systems often find that tasks from one system depend on tasks in another. Tasktop 1.6 now supports linking across task repositories as well as importing and migration features, making it easy to manage tasks across ALM systems. For example, a user story in one system can be linked with defects in another.

Improved Time Tracking - New time charts and reports in Tasktop 1.6 take the pain out of time tracking by allowing developers to quickly review and adjust time spent on each task before submitting data to the team’s project management tools.

Full support for C/C++ – Mylyn 3.3 and Tasktop 1.6 now provide complete task-focused programming support is available for C/C++ developers using CDT. Code focusing was first implemented for Java, then extended to enterprise developers with focus for Spring Framework artifacts via the SpringSource Tool Suite, and as of this release is finally available to all developers using CDT.

In total, Mylyn 3.3 resolves 163 Bugzilla reports and includes 18 enhancements, see the Mylyn 3.3 New & Noteworthy. For more on Tasktop’s new capabilities, see the Tasktop 1.6 New & Noteworthy or download a free trial.

 
Close the ALM communication loop with Tasktop 1.6

Task federation, task context capture and to-the-minute time tracking mean that, as developers, we can easily indicate the task we are currently working, collaborate using the ALM tool instead of email, and convert a relevant email thread into a user story with a couple of clicks. Focusing and one-click multitasking across all ALM artifacts ensures that we activate tasks voluntarily, not because it was suggested that we do so. The privacy controls in the time tracking and context capture features streamline collaboration with management without loss of empowerment. And the fact that every task has a context associated with it provides long-term organization value, since it means that when we’re asked to fix a colleagues bug from six months ago, we get to start where they left off. By lining up project management’s needs for visibility with developer’s desire to deliver code without being overly encumbered by process, tool support for Agile task management takes the software development process to a new level of productivity and predictability.

Photo courtesy of seeb’s Photo Stream

In most development circles breaking the build is a serious offense, with good reason. As other programmers check out the broken source code their progress becomes blocked, as they can no longer compile (and thus test) the software. The cost of blocking an entire development team is so large that many shops have resorted to shame tactics, forcing offenders to wear embarrassing hats or shirts. Fortunately, Tasktop can significantly reduce your chances of obtaining a new headpiece by automatically tracking changes related to each task.

Common Problem: Committing Too Much, or Too Little
One of the major causes of build breakage is committing the wrong set of files for a given fix. These types of problems reduce to 1) committing files that are unrelated to the fix and 2) omitting files that are relevant to the fix. Either case can easily cause a broken build as a committed file can reference a new method or field in an uncommitted file. While it might sound easy to track the changed files for a particular task, developers that try to do this manually face several challenges:

1. Tracking individual tasks can exceed working memory – For some tasks developers must change more than a few files. For any task that requires changes to more than seven files the developer must remember a list of files that exceeds many people’s working memory capacity.
2. Multi-tasking requires multi-tracking – Developers work on more than one task in parallel, and thus must track files for each task. If a developer is working on five tasks in parallel, changing as few as three files per task requires remembering 15 files, in addition to the file to task mapping.
3. Tracking changes can span days, or even weeks – A particular development task can often become blocked after the developer has already changed several files. As the developer waits days or even weeks for the task to become unblocked his memory of the changed files will likely start to decay.

Tasktop can help you avoid these problems. It can automatically track the files you change for a given task, freeing up your working memory. Tasktop eliminates the multi-tasking problem as well, tracking changes for each task separately. Finally, it avoids the memory decay problem.

Solution: Automatic Change Set Management

In order to use Tasktop to automatically manage your change sets you only need to activate tasks as you work on them. To activate a task you can click on the icon next to the task in the Task List.

In this example Bug #59, “Cannot read emails from Thunderbird” has been activated, as indicated by the icon and the bold summary in the Task List.

Once you’ve activated a task continue to edit, compile, debug as you normally would. The only changes to your existing workflow are when you finish a task. Once you finish a task open the Synchronize View and toggle the model mode, as shown below:

Once the model is changed to show change sets you’ll notice that all of your outgoing changes have been arranged by task (i.e., a change set has been created for each task). Similarly, all incoming changes are organized by task. Below the same set of changes is presented in the Java Model Mode (background) and in Change Set Mode (foreground). Many people consider it much easier to interpret the changes in Change Set Mode because all of the changed projects and files for a given task are grouped together in that change set. In the Java Model Mode the changes are listed per project, and thus any changes involving more than one project are scattered throughout this list. Additionally, any project that contains changes for several tasks groups the changes together into one change set.

To commit your changes, select the current task, which is bold, and use the context menu to commit the changes. Tasktop automatically fills in your commit comment so that others know which task your changes correspond to, and can navigate from the committed code to the corresponding task.

In the above commit dialog the commit is for the task 5256 and the automatically generated comment includes the task status, task type, task ID, task summary, and, on the next line, the task URL. The format of the automatically generated comment is configurable, and you can change it to match the format that your team prefers (Window -> Preferences -> Task -> Team) by adding the completion date, the assignee, etc. or rearranging the order of the template. For this commit only one file is involved, the AbstractTaskAssociation.java file, which is shown below the commit comment.

Allowing Tasktop to manage your change-sets for you has several advantages. First and foremost, it ensures that you are committing the correct files for a given task. Although it is still possible to break the build* the chances of breaking the build are significantly reduced. Additionally, if you abandon a task prior to committing your changes for any reason, it is easy to revert the changes for that task by selecting “Override and Update” for that change set. Furthermore, all of your commits are automatically commented with a link to the relevant task, so others in the team can more easily interpret your changes. If all team members are using change sets to commit their code it can improve collaboration. For instance, a colleague can commit a fix and ask you to test it. Because the incoming changes are organized by change set you can select the fix of interest and just update that change, isolating the code of interest.

Tasktop’s change set management can reduce your mental burden during programming, allowing you to focus on the important problems at hand by tracking the details for you. If you’d like to get started with automatic change set management, download Tasktop Pro.

* If you work on two tasks in parallel that involve changing the same file it is possible to break the build by committing one of the tasks without committing the other.

Do you have news for the task-focused community? Send news to news@tasktop.com

 http://eclipse.org/mylyn/downloads/#weekly

If you have already been affected by this bug and see hundreds of false incomings in your Task List, after installing the latest Mylyn weekly build you will want to restore your last known good task list using the Task List view menu’s “Restore Tasks from History…” wizard.

Tasktop Pro users, an Early Access build that includes the fix will be available before noon pacific time (Sept 1).  Once available the build will be announced on the EA announcement task.

If you are experiencing any problems submitting changes to existing tasks, try updating your repository configuration and then try submitting again. To force an update of the repository configuration, open the Task Repositories view (Window > Show View > Other > Tasks > Task Repositories), right+click on the repository in question and in the resulting popup choose “Update Repository Configuration”.

As telecommuting and globally distributed teams become the status quo, face-to-face meetings are no longer the sole source of project updates. For many programmers, the issue tracker has become the most important source of information for their projects, yet monitoring an issue tracker can quickly become overwhelming. Gavin Sharp, a member of the Firefox team, reported receiving over 1800 email updates from his issue tracker in one day!

Gavin Sharp’s Bugmail Over Time: Gavin went as far as tracking his amount of overload vs time. Tasktop can save you from a similar fate.

While Gavin is likely an outlier, most developers can still receive dozens to hundreds of email updates per day. Without tool support for processing these updates, developers are overwhelmed by the volume of bugmail and hampered by their email client’s inability to present task updates in a structured manner. The Tasktop rich client eases this situation by reducing the number of updates, presenting recent changes in an easy-to-interpret manner, and focusing the user on important tasks.

Processing your initial incomings with Tasktop

When starting with Tasktop you’ll first need to connect to your issue tracker to enable you to access bugs or issues directly on your desktop. Given the myriad names for issues, bugs, etc., we use the term task to refer to an item of interest in your issue tracker and we use Task Repository to refer to the issue tracker itself. In a previous article (see: Tracking Tasks) we described how to set up Tasktop to track all tasks assigned to you and that you are interested in. Once you configure Tasktop you can begin systematically processing your incomings updates.

When you first connect to a Task Repository all your tracked tasks will be decorated in the Task List with a “new incoming” arrow (as on task #76 below), which means that you have not yet viewed it in Tasktop.

This icon and others, such as the “incoming” and “outgoing” arrows, allow you to quickly scan your Task List and determine which changes you should review immediately and which are less pressing (see UI Legend for a complete legend). This ability leads to Time Savings #1, illustrated below.

	Time Savings #1 – Processing tasks in a Task List is faster than processing tasks in an email inbox Which task would you view if you only had time to monitor one task? With the Task List, it’s easy to devote your attention to the most important issues because they’re categorized and prioritized. In the Task List above Task #3 has the highest priority, thus it is presented at the top of the list and the high priority icon is placed beside it. When all task updates appear as unreads in your inbox it is impossible to tell which update is most important.

As you work with Tasktop and see incomings you’ll notice that there are two ways of reviewing incoming updates. Some tasks you can review directly in the Task List using the tooltip preview. By hovering over a task with incomings you can view a summary of the changes to the task. For instance, the priority has changed from P2 to P1 on Task #10 below.

However, for other tasks, especially those tasks that you own, you’ll usually want to view the detailed changes, which is convenient in Tasktop. Click on the task in the Task List to open the Task Editor, which shows all of the task information and highlights the changed fields in light blue. Tasktop’s easy-to-scan UI leads to Time Savings #2, illustrated below.

Daily Processing with Tasktop

Once you’ve processed your Task List for the first time all future processing times will become much faster. Here are the top four tips for speeding up your processing time.

		Review Only the Blue – Many changes can be reviewed directly in the Task List, which is faster, but large updates require a detailed view. Double-click on a task to open the Task Editor for that task and review the changes, which are highlighted in blue. It does not take long to open the Task Editor (less than 200ms in almost all cases!) so do not hesitate to drill down on a task.
		Use the Tooltips - Hover over a task to see a summary of changes in a tooltip and avoid opening tasks where the incoming changes can be completely reviewed in the tooltip (e.g., a change in priority). If tooltip popup isn’t quick enough click on a task in the Task List and use the up and down arrows to scroll through the list with the popups showing.
		Mark as Read - Mark a task as “read” (i.e., removing the incoming arrow) by right clicking on it in the Task List and selecting “Mark as Read” or pressing Alt+Shft+R.
		Respond, Submit, Continue – If an incoming requires your response, open the Task Editor, update the task as necessary (e.g., add a comment), and submit. Then immediately continue processing your Task List. The Task Editor will inform you if the submit fails and you can continue to make progress during the submission.
		Reduce the noise - If you’re still getting too many incomings consider reducing the scope of your queries. A good rule of thumb is that if you don’t open the Task Editor for any tasks in a query during the course of several days then this query is not appropriate for day-to-day monitoring. Consider using working sets to hide these queries if you still want to monitor the tasks occasionally.

Tip number two, possible because Tasktop is a rich client, is an important time savings compared with many web UIs or email inbox and web UI combinations. Tasktop’s integrated approach which provides both a task view and the Task List in one window leads to Time Savings #3.

If you’re currently tracking your projects using email or even using your issue tracker’s web interface it is difficult (but not impossible) to follow a systematic workflow when processing tasks. Tasktop eliminates a lot of the accidental complexity of processing incomings and guides (without forcing) the user to become more systematic. We’ve found that systematic processing allows programmers to retain a better grasp on the state of his projects while at the same time reducing the time he spends tracking those projects. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the volume of your project’s tasks and your task repository is already supported, check out the 60 day free trial of Tasktop and give us your feedback. If your repository is not yet supported make sure to vote.

ObjectivEClipse 0.2 released by Alex Blewitt
	ObjectivEClipse provides support for writing Objective-C in Eclipse and builds on the CDT to provide Mylyn’s task-focused programming support. Check out the screenshots comparing ObjectivEClipse with and without Mylyn.
Aptana and Lighthouse for easy ticket tracking by Nater Kane
	Learn how to connect Aptana Andretti Alpha to Lighthouse using Mylyn’s Web Templates Connector.
Installing Mylyn into ColdFusion Builder by Marc Esher
	See this post for steps to install Mylyn into Mylyn into an Eclipse 3.4-based ColdFusion Builder. As discussed in the comment thread, Mike Henke has submitted a feature request to have Mylyn bundled with ColdFusion Builder. If you could also benefit from better Mylyn integration with ColdFusion Builder, vote for the feature request.
Mylyn with XPlanner by merereflections
	Integrate Mylyn with XPlanner with a few easy steps. “Mylyn is a very powerful tool and now we can use it with XPlanner seamlessly”
the best new Mylyn feature by kaazar
	kaazar gives the thumbs up to Mylyn’s new “I’m feeling lazy” button first proposed by Chris Aniszczyk, “for those occasions when you just want a task GIVEN to you”.
Crowdsourcing Documentation at Eclipse by Chris Aniszczyk
	In this article Chris Aniszczyk shows how the Mylyn project crowdsources documentation and asks whether the same approach would work well for other Eclipse projects. Check out the lively discussion thread.
Using Bugzilla to track features by Victor Palau
	See this post for a proposed set of conventions for using Bugzilla (and Mylyn) to track feature development.

Do you have news for the task-focused community? Send news to news@tasktop.com

This screencast shows an example of how to install the Atlassian Connector for Eclipse, which provides Eclipse integration for JIRA, Bamboo, Crucible and FishEye. All other Tasktop Certified connectors can also be installed using the Connector Discovery wizard.

For many developers, tracking time is an annoying but necessary part of their everyday life. Depending on the organization developers may be required to:

		Report the time spent on a particular project or for a particular client for the past month
		Report the actual time that it took to finish each task in the last iteration to refine Scrum estimations
		Report the average burn rate on a given contract for the past 6 months

Fortunately, Tasktop makes gathering and reporting this information painless. Tasktop not only tracks the time that you spend on each task (see Privacy below) it allows users to organize, adjust, and report this information to your team’s issue tracking system without leaving Tasktop or a Tasktop-enabled Eclipse IDE.

Managing Your Time with Tasktop

If you are already using Tasktop to organize your work then it is easy to set up Tasktop to manage your time as well. In fact, Tasktop is already tracking your time for your personal records and Tasktop’s Time Reporting Feature allows you to view and manage this information. To begin reporting your time with Tasktop you’ll first need to create a time report. On the time tracking dashboard (Tasktop Home -> Track Time) select “Create Report” and create a name for the report.

This report offers you detailed information about how you’ve spent your time in the task table as well as a graphical summary of your time data. The bar graphs at the top left show a breakdown of how you spent your time each day during the time period and the pie charts specify the time worked as a percentage, broken down into individual tasks and working sets. Take a minute to review how you’ve spent each day in the last week by hovering over individual cells in the bar graphs (as shown below). For a more detailed view of a given day select the “View by Day” button in the upper-right of the table section and the table will be reorganized to show the tasks worked on each day.

Once you have created a new report you’ll need to determine the scope of the report, in terms of time period and relevant tasks. For many users, these two guidelines will help them choose the best scope:

Because Tasktop automatically tracks your time and fills out your time report the only step that is left is to review this information. Since personal time information is private Tasktop gives you complete control over this information, including the ability to adjust automatically recorded times. When reviewing the report you can adjust it by:

		Adding/Removing tasks
		Adding/Removing offline activities
		Adjusting the time for existing tasks/activities

Finally, upon reviewing your time report you can submit it by pressing “Submit Time”. This will upload the times to your issue tracker for each task. A preview, as shown at the beginning of this post, will show exactly which tasks are being updated.

We recommend reviewing and submitting your time approximately each week, regardless of the time period of the report. This time period offers most people the best tradeoff between the overhead of opening the report and updating it and the potential of forgetting past offline activities, such as meetings, that they might need to add to the report. While we recommend a week, users can update and upload the reporter as many times as necessary, as only the updated data will be uploaded to the server.

Do you have news for the task-focused community? Send news to news@tasktop.com