Tasktop Blog

In December we launched the connector for ThoughtWorks Studios’ Mingle agile project management system. Today, we’re pleased to announce availability of additional connectors for ThoughtWorks Studios’ Cruise release managment and Twist test automation products. With innovations such as Murmurs and the upcoming Google Wave integration, ThoughtWorks Studios has been innovating at a rapid pace and we’re excited to be extending the reach of the entire ThoughtWorks Studios Adaptive ALM product suite into the Eclipse IDE.

Cruise Connector

The Cruise Connector allows developers to access and manage their Cruise continuous integration servers from within the Eclipse IDE. Cruise servers are easily configured in Eclipse much like Mylyn or Tasktop task repositories. Once configured, the build view provides facilities to initiate builds and monitor build status. Integration with the Mingle Connector makes it easy to create and assign new tasks in Mingle to correct build failures.

Cruise Builds View in Eclipse

When developing in Eclipse, screen real estate is precious. This means that the Cruise Build view won’t always be visible. A best practice is to use a fast view as shown below to minimize the view while not in use. The fast view icon indicates the current build status and clicking the icon restores the full build view.

The Cruise fast view icon indicates build status without occupying screen space

Twist Connector

The Twist Connector bridges ThoughtWorks Studios’ Twist test automation tool with the Eclipse IDE and the Mingle and Cruise components of the Adaptive ALM product suite. This allows developers to manage Twist scenarios, Cruise builds and Mingle cards without leaving the development environment. The Connector leverages task-focused interface technology to focus the Scenarios view on only the scenarios that are relevant for the currently active Mingle card. When Twist tests fail, new cards reporting the corresponding defects can be added to Mingle from Eclipse with a few clicks.

Focused Scenarios view and enhanced Scenarios Editor

Integrated access to Mingle and Twist

Availability

The latest version of Tasktop, version 1.6.2, is available now and includes the connectors for ThoughtWorks Studios Mingle and Cruise. The Twist connector will be available next Wednesday March 31st when Twist 2.0 is released.

Learn more about the Mingle Connector

Download Tasktop Pro with ThoughtWorks Studios Connectors

Steffen Pingel and Shawn Minto from the Tasktop team will be at EclipseCon which is being held this week (March 22nd to 25th) at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara, California. Mik Kersten regrets that he won’t be able to attend until Wednesday evening due to a personal matter. Here is the complete list of Tasktop and Mylyn related sessions.

		Update, demos, and open-panel on Microsoft’s tooling for interoperability with Eclipse Monday, 3:50pm Tasktop’s Shawn Minto will give a demo of the updates to Eclipse for Windows 7 that Tasktop has been collaborating on with Microsoft.
		Documentation: Single-Sourcing, Crowd-Sourcing And Other Voodoo Tuesday, 2:00pm David Green of Make Technologies and Chris Aniszczyk of Red Hat will deliver a session on documentation best practices at Eclipse including on how to use Mylyn WikiText.
		Simplifying update and extension install for RCP applications Wednesday, 3:45pm Steffen Pingel of Tasktop will co-present with Susan McCourt of IBM Rational on how to leverage p2 to add easy-to-use extension install capabilities to Eclipse RCP applications.
		From Tasks to Tweets: The IDE is Going Social Thursday, 1:30pm In this talk Mik Kersten will review how communication technologies have changed the face of the IDE in the past decade and conclude with a longer-term vision of how developers will communicate around collaborative tasks.
		The future of Mylyn Thursday, 2:00pm Mik Kersten will introduce the new sub-projects of the Mylyn project and discuss the extension, collaboration and contribution opportunities that will be created.
		Mylyn Reviews - Finding a new home for ReviewClipse Thursday, 2:30pm Mario Bernhart and Kilian Matt of INSO will explain why ReviewClipse is set to become a sub-project of Mylyn and how it provides task-focused code review capabilities.

If you’d like to meet with a member of the Tasktop team at EclipseCon, contact us and we’ll arrange a convenient time.

Over the past year I’ve been working closely with those in the Tasktop and Mylyn community at large to define best practices for task-focused programming and collaboration. My goal has been to share what I’ve learned about how the leaders in task management use Tasktop and Mylyn to collaborate effectively. To this end, I’ve created several articles on the major task management topics. My focus on major topics is necessary to communicate the full task management vision, but it also results in longer, more intense in-depth posts.

I’ve found the perfect companion series to my in-depth best practices posts. Marc Esher, a thought leader in the Eclipse and Cold Fusion community has been creating an outstanding series of articles on Mylyn best practices in short, bite-sized posts. His content includes great text and often includes a video walkthrough of the feature or concept that he is focusing on. Next coffee break skip the walk (or drive) to Starbucks, grab a home-brewed cup, and spend 5 minutes with one of Marc’s posts. You’ll save a few dollars and your new-found Mylyn knowledge could save you a few minutes (each day!).

Here are Marc’s Mylyn posts to date:

1. Why Mylyn is Indispensible
2. The Best Eclipse Menu You’ve Never Heard Of
3. Mylyn and Jira Short Tutorial
4. Mylyn and Jira Sharing Context
5. Mylyn Creating New Issues

I hope you enjoy these articles. If you have any input on task management best practices please join the dialog with me on Twitter. I love to hear from users and your input will influence our future posts.

We’re pleased to announce that Tasktop Pro now includes a connector for the VersionOne Agile project management solution. This new connector extends the Agile offerings of the Tasktop Certified suite of integrations, and provides the full productivity benefits of the task-focused interface to users of theVersionOne Enterprise and Ultimate on-premise and on-demand products.

Watch the VersionOne Connector video

Get more done, increase project visibility
The Connector enables VersionOne development teams to take advantage of Tasktop’s task-focused interface technology. This benefits developers in two key ways:

		Spend less time checking and updating VersionOne. By integrating VersionOne with the Eclipse IDE, the Connector eliminates the need to constantly toggle between the development environment, change notifications arriving via email, and the VersionOne web client. With Tasktop, all collaboration around VersionOne artifacts happens within the development environment, reducing the friction of updating VersionOne, and providing increased project status visibility.
		Multitask and recover from interruptions with one click. Tasktop reorganizes the development environment around VersionOne stories and defects and automatically tracks the source code for each artifact. When returning to work on a story or defect, a single click restores the previous state of the workspace including open editors and shows only the relevant source code. This task-focused interface technology makes it much easier to multitask and recover from interruptions, resulting in measurable productivity gains.

VersionOne tasks and task editor

Track time the easy way
Thanks to the task-focused interface, developers using Tasktop already indicate which task they’re working on to focus the interface on only the most relevant source code. This makes it possible to automatically track time spent on each story or defect and Tasktop provides facilities to adjust times as needed and upload the information directly to VersionOne. This reduces the time tracking burden on developers while improving project visibility with time tracking data that is based on actuals.

VersionOne time tracking

Going Agile? Adopt VersionOne alongside existing systems
Most organizations have one or more legacy systems for tracking bugs, feature requests, or managing software development processes. Frequently, these systems can’t simply be replaced with agile project management systems because they contain valuable historical information and have been customized to enforce a particular workflow. Tasktop eases agile adoption in these environments by leveraging the ecosystem of 45 interoperable connectors to access multiple systems from the same interface. Furthermore, stories and defects in VersionOne can be linked to dependent artifacts in other systems, making it easy to navigate between related items across different systems.

Get desktop access for product owners
In addition to the Eclipse IDE plugin, the VersionOne Connector is also included in the Tasktop Pro desktop application that provides instant and offline access to VersionOne stories and defects. Tasktop Pro also provides productivity features such as integration with Outlook and Google calendars, and the ability to automatically track web pages and documents related to a particular story or defect in VersionOne.

Download it
Tasktop Pro with the VersionOne connector is available for download now. Tasktop Pro and Eclipse Mylyn users with Eclipse 3.5 or higher can also install the VersionOne connector from within Eclipse via the Mylyn Connector Discovery (File > new > task > install more connectors).

See the VersionOne Connector overview for more screenshots and features.

Each year the Eclipse Foundation holds an election to vote in board representatives for its committers and sustaining members. If you represent one of these member classes you have one week from today to cast your vote. I’m running as a sustaining member representative and my vision is below. Voting uses a single transferrable voting system, so be sure to read other candidates’ positions before voting.

Vision

Eclipse has reached a stage of maturity that enables Sustaining Members to play a primary role in driving the direction of Eclipse. As Sustaining Members, we represent the largest volume of the Eclipse membership. In 2010 our impact on Eclipse and the value we receive from participating are poised for substantial growth.

I’ve been closely engaged with both the technology and the business aspects of the Eclipse ecosystem since the outset in 2001. I’ve worked directly with many Solution Member companies and watched some Eclipse business models flourish while others have failed. Starting a successful company around Eclipse has given me a pragmatic perspective on how to participate in the platform while growing both product and service revenues on Eclipse-based offerings. As a Sustaining Member representative, my duty will be to apply that knowledge to help make your Eclipse-based efforts successful.

Succeeding in Eclipse means striking a balance between the member, committer and user communities. As board representative, my priorities will be to:

		Facilitate reaching users: Marketing in a vendor-neutral open source ecosystem can be far from obvious, and reaching the very broad Eclipse user base is needed for both the commercial success of members and of Eclipse as a whole. I have been closely involved in improving the install story for Eclipse solutions and the upcoming Eclipse Marketplace client. These efforts will provide the next generation of opportunities to get your solution into Eclipse users’ hands.
		Lower the barrier to engaging with projects: With product releases and other pressures, too often the step of getting directly involved with an Eclipse project that you build on does not make the cost/benefit cut. But not getting involved has the longer-term cost of incompatibilities and overhead. Lowering the bar for direct participation will provide members with better access to the collaboration and contributor community that make Eclipse a great open source ecosystem. On the Mylyn project we have had over 800 bugs and feature requests resolved by community contributions. I will use my experience of making this work for Mylyn to help lower the overhead of participation with existing projects so that similar benefits are accessible to more members.
		Listen to members: My job will be to represent your needs on the board, and I will work with the other representatives to actively seek out feedback from all Solution Members. I helped make the needs of individual committers heard as a committer representative on the Eclipse board, and will ensure that your needs are represented in discussions and decisions made at the board level.

About the candidate

Dr. Mik Kersten is the CEO of Tasktop Technologies and lead of the Eclipse Mylyn project. Mik is a popular speaker on Eclipse at conferences in the United States, Germany, and worldwide. Highlights of Mik’s contributions to Eclipse include:

		Creator and lead of the Eclipse Mylyn project (since 2005)
		Active member of the Eclipse Architecture Council (since 2007)
		Elected committer representative on the Eclipse Board of Directors in (2008/2009)
		Only Eclipse evangelist to be voted a JavaOne Rock Star (2008 and 2009)
		Only Eclipse content author on the top authors of the decade list of IBM developerWorks Java
		PhD in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia that lead to the invention of Mylyn’s task-focused interface (2006)
		Co-creator of the Eclipse AspectJ and AJDT projects (2002) based on his work creating of the first Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) tools, Xerox PARC (2000)

Related publications

		Symbian Blog: Mik Kersten on Transparency
		Tasktop Blog: Growing open source ecosystems: the install story
		Tasktop Blog: Tasktop working with Microsoft to improve Eclipse on Windows 7
		How Software is Built: Interview with Mik Kersten (highest ranked in series)
		Tasktop Blog: Tips on paying for free software
		Tasktop Blog: Platform for Innovation, Part 1: Openness & Modularity

Read more about Mik Kersten on Wikipedia.