Tasktop Blog

We’ve seen a steady stream of requests for Perforce integration and we’re pleased to join Perforce in announcing P4Mylyn, a Tasktop Certified Mylyn connector for the award-winning Perforce Fast Software Configuration Management System.

P4Mylyn is both a full-featured SCM connector and a task repository connector for “Jobs”, Perforce’s built-in defect tracking system. With the connector, Perforce teams can now take advantage of Mylyn’s SCM capabilities such as organizing commits by task, auto-generating comments, and navigating from code to the relevant task. Furthermore, thanks to the connector, Perforce can now be seamlessly integrated with the growing ecosystem of more than 45 compatible defect trackers and project management systems.

Perforce Jobs in the task list and modified files grouped by task

in the Synchronize view

Key Features

		Automatically track the context of Perforce-managed assets related to each task. This makes it easy to commit to Perforce (or revert) only the relevant changes when working on multiple tasks.
		Generate commit comments with links to the active task, creating seamless code-to-task navigation and traceability.
		Integrate Perforce with defect tracking and project management tools that have Mylyn connectors, such as Atlassian JIRA, Bugzilla, CollabNet TeamForge and ScrumWorks, IBM Rational ClearQuest and ClearCase, Rally, ThoughtWorks Studios Mingle and VersionOne.
		Access ‘Jobs’, Perforce’s built-in defect tracking system, using Mylyn’s task-focused interface. This gives developers complete visibility into the tasks their team members are working on and automatically links their own pending work to the Perforce job being fixed.
		Display only the changes relevant to a given task when using graphical differencing tools.

Perforce participation in the Mylyn project

Perforce has actively engaged with the Mylyn project and taken a key role in driving innovation in the Mylyn SCM APIs. This is great news for the entire Mylyn and Tasktop community as developers using any of the various Mylyn SCM connectors will benefit from the API upgrades, which make the SCM experience better integrated and more robust for everyone.

Get the P4Mylyn connector

P4Mylyn is included in the Perforce Plug-in for Eclipse. View installation instructions or install from within Eclipse using the Mylyn Connector Discovery via New Task > Install More Connectors…

Need Perforce? Download and evaluate Perforce free from the Perforce website.

Mik Kersten, Tasktop CEO and creator of the Eclipse Mylyn project, will be presenting at JAX 2010 in Mainz, Germany this week. Mik’s talks will cover new features in the latest Mylyn release and discuss the impact of Twitter and other forms of social collaboration on software development. Steffen Pingel, Senior Software Developer at Tasktop and Mylyn Committer, will deliver a talk on his experiences with bringing a Firefox-style install experience to the Eclipse platform. Here is the complete list of Tasktop and Mylyn related sessions.

		From Tasks to Tweets: Social Collaboration for Software Developers Mik Kersten, Wednesday, 4:15pm Developers are increasingly relying on social technologies to get work done. Some worry that constant real-time communication will bring productivity to a halt. But new technologies and practices are forming in order to help organizations harness social collaboration as part of an Agile process and integrated tool set. This talk will demonstrate how we can use the latest social tools alongside established ALM technologies to promote productivity instead of procrastination.
		Mylyn 3.4: from Stack Trace to Scrum Mik Kersten, Wednesday, 10:15am The rapid adoption of Mylyn has made next big evolution of the IDE clear. Stories and tasks are more central than sourcecode, focus is more important than features, and integration with the Agile workflow is the biggest productivity boost since code completion. This talk will review how new features in the latest Mylyn release and new integrations can make the entire Agile team more productive.
		Bringing easy Extension Install to your RCP Applications Steffen Pingel, Tuesday, 4:45pm Eclipse P2 is a powerful tool for managing plug-ins but lacks a UI that matches the ease of use of the Firefox extension installer which has helped to perpetuate the browsers success. To bring the Firefox install experience to RCP applications and Eclipse-based tools the Mylyn project has developed a reusable component on top of P2 that provides a simplified installer.

If you’d like to meet with a member of the Tasktop team at JAX 2010, contact us and we’ll arrange a convenient time.

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.

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.

The Mylyn JIRA Connector has been developed as part of the Eclipse Mylyn project since 2006 (Bug 109905), when Wesley Coelho and I met in a Vancouver coffee shop and decided to start collaborating on an idea for a startup that involved extending Mylyn’s open source integrations to commercial tools. A year later Wesley became one of the first employees at a new company called Tasktop Technologies, the connector took off, saw steady community contributions, and Mylyn’s reach was extended to JIRA users. Later in 2007 we kicked off a collaboration with Atlassian to improve the JIRA Connector, which in 2008/09 led to Tasktop working with Atlassian to create the initial Atlassian Bamboo and Crucible connectors, now part of the Atlassian Connector for Eclipse effort hosted on studio.atlassian.com. The time has come to merge the two codebases of Atlassian’s Eclipse integrations, and Atlassian has asked that the JIRA connector move to studio.atlassian.com.

According to Atlassian, the decision migrate the source code to their own infrastructure was driven by a desire for greater operational efficiency. Both the implementation of the Connector for Eclipse and the APIs in Atlassian’s server products are evolving, and hosting all these projects in a unified infrastructure enables faster development and more frequent releases of new and improved functionality. The Atlassian Connector for Eclipse will continue to be open source and distributed under the EPL. Anyone can view full project activity and download the full source at https://studio.atlassian.com/browse/PLE. Currently, all committers to the Atlassian Connector for Eclipse are either Atlassian or Tasktop employees, but Atlassian is working to allow others to commit new functionality to the code base.

Mylyn has grown from two integrations to over four dozen, and is playing a driving role in developers’ adoption of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Agile collaboration tools. Having a connector hosted as part of the Mylyn project used to be vital due to the friction of finding and installing Eclipse extensions, and the JIRA connector got very broad exposure. But with our introduction of the Mylyn Connector Discovery feature in last year’s Eclipse Galileo release, it became trivial for users to install Mylyn connectors wherever they are hosted. Also thanks to the discovery mechanism, the move will be transparent to users of the integration.

For users of Tasktop and Mylyn, the main concern is the availability of a high-quality connector. One of the most important aspects of Mylyn’s architecture is that it provides a unified user experience across all integrations, since the majority of the user interaction is handled by the Mylyn framework. Atlassian has provided assurance that they will contribute to the Mylyn framework as part of increasing their own resources behind the integration, which will help ensure that the integration evolves along with upcoming changes in Mylyn. An expected benefit of the move is that some of the shortcomings of the integration that stem from JIRA’s SOAP APIs, such as the lack of support for custom fields and workflows, will be addressed more quickly with all of the code hosted and supported under one umbrella. Tasktop’s relationship with Atlassian continues, and the JIRA connector remains part of the Tasktop Certified program that ensures usability and ALM stack interoperability.

Mylyn’s goal is to provide a framework for Eclipse ALM integrations and to support an ecosystem of extensions. To that end, we have aimed from the start to provide reference integrations to open source tools, starting with Bugzilla. The JIRA integration was the exception as JIRA is closed source, but has been very popular with open source developers due its use in some open source communities such as Apache. The move of the JIRA connector restores the clear split between Mylyn’s reference integrations to open source repositories, hosted on eclipse.org/mylyn and the very the broad ecosystem of integrations with closed source tools. This will help focus the resources of the project on the core framework and open source integrations, while mechanisms such as Connector Discovery and the Tasktop Certified program ensure easy installation and the quality of the connectors that developers need to get the most out of Mylyn.

“An apprentice carpenter may want only a hammer and saw, but a master craftsman employs many precision tools. Computer programming likewise requires sophisticated tools to cope with the complexity of real applications, and only practice with these tools will build skill in their use.

–Robert L. Kruse, Data Structures and Program Design

Eclipse is one of the most sophisticated toolsets ever offered to developers. Its plethora of available tools can eliminate many headaches from a developer’s day. Unfortunately, there are days when headaches still occur, as developers struggle to discover and use all Eclipse has to offer. A great technique for discovering the most useful tools in Eclipse is to watch an experienced developer work. In this post I’ll be sharing my change set toolset knowledge, gained from watching others, in hopes of eliminating unnecessary clicks and frustration from your workday.

The (Small) Cost of Change Set Support

Contrary to many spammers’ beliefs, everything in life has some costs, and the advantages offered by Tasktop and Mylyn’s change set tooling are no exception. To enable the benefits of the change set tooling you will need to:

1. Click the “Activate” button on a task before starting that task
2. Click the “Deactivate” button when finishing a task

Once you develop the habit of working in this way (see Task-Focused Tutorial for details) then you will be able to:

1. Navigate from any line of code to the relevant task or bug report
2. Review your teammates changes and view only the files that changed
3. Quickly erase changes made for a given task (Undo at the task level)

The following sections will walk you through different aspects of the change set tooling and show you how to maximize your benefits.

Change Set - ..the set of changes made in a single commit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control

In (hopefully) all software development organizations there is repository for storing your code. For Eclipse users this often means using a Software Configuration Management (SCM) system like CVS or Subversion. When working with an SCM developers usually download the entire code base and then submit updates to this code base in the form of change sets, or a set of files that they have changed.

Tip #1: Tracking Current Changes

Tasktop and Mylyn automatically track the changes that you make as you work on a task, thus automatically creating a change set. You can view all of your current changes by opening the Synchronize View. Be sure to toggle the view model (circled below) until you are viewing changes as change sets.

Viewing changes using the Synchronize View makes it easy to quickly review others’ changes and to manipulate your own. The left pane in this example contains four change sets, one of which is expanded.

As you make changes when working on a task a new change set will be created and shown in the Synchronize View. Thus, when you have completed a task it is easy to commit only the relevant code. Open the Synchronize View, right-click on the change set, and select Commit. Occasionally you will work on a task and then abandon it, either because it seems infeasible or because priorities have shifted. In this case it is easy to remove all the changes you’ve made for that particular task by selecting the change set in the Synchronize View and selecting Override and Update (see screenshot above).

Tip #2: Connecting Commits with Tasks

All source code was written for a reason, but when viewing a particular file the original reasoning is not always clear. Fortunately, when using Tasktop/Mylyn tasks to track your work you can easily connect every line of code with the reason it was changed. This connection makes interpreting individual files easier and reviewing changes after-the-fact possible.

Creating and Configuring Automatic Commit Messages: When using tasks to track your work meaningful commit messages will be attached to every commit that you make. When you attempt to commit a set of files Tasktop/Mylyn will automatically populate the commit dialog with tasks that were active when you changed these files.

In the above example you can see that the file AbstractTaskAssociation.java is the only file in this change set and that bug 5256 was active when it was changed. To establish a connection between this change set and your task simply do not erase the commit message. Later, when viewing the changed lines in file AbstractTaskAssociation.java it will be easy to trace back to the relevant task (discussed below).

Advanced Tip: Changing Your Commit Message

If your team decides that these commit messages are not exactly as they would like them to be they can configure the template by selecting Tasks -> Team in Window -> Preferences. They can use the following variables as well as any text to alter the commit message. You must keep the task URL in the commit message to enable easy task lookup, all other variables are optional.

Commit message variables: connector.task.prefix, repository.kind, repository.url, task.assignee, task.cc, task.description, task.id, task.key, task.keywords, task.lastmodified, task.notes, task.priority, task.product, task.reporter, task.resolution, task.status, task.summary, task.type, task.url, task.completiondate, task.creationdate, task.reminderdate

From Code to Task: Enabling the automatic commit messages allows your team to trace from any line of code back to the last task that changed that line of code. Starting from a source file, use the context menu in the editor to select Team -> Show Annotations. This will populate the gutters of the editor with a line to task mapping.

In the example above you can see that method isValidUrl was last changed to ensure that URLs did not contain spaces. To open the relevant task use the context menu in the History View (automatically opened for you) and select Open Corresponding Task.

Viewing the task has several advantages for understanding a particular line of code.

1. The description and comments of the task often have relevant information, including design decisions or problems that were encountered.
2. The task context (if available) will allow you to interpret the changes as a whole.
3. The task contains information about the people involved, including those that did not make the commit, whom you may want to discuss the code with.

Tip #3: Sharing Changes with the Team

In the open source community developers often need to submit a patch, essentially a change set, to address a particular bug. The developer in charge of that component will review the patch and either apply it or ask for improvements. The process of creating, reviewing, applying, and reapplying a patch is painless with Tasktop.
When a developer is creating a patch he (or she) usually begins with an up-to-date workspace. He then changes a few files to implement the fix. Once complete, he can use the Synchronize View to create the patch (left), which he can then attach to the bug using the Task Editor (right).

Sharing Changes with Your Team (click to enlarge)

Once the patch is attached to the bug he can revert to a clean workspace by Overriding and Updating his change set in the Synchronize View. If the patch is not approved he can, directly from the task, reapply the patch (below) and begin working on the necessary changes, again submitting an updated patch to the bug.

The developer reviewing the task also has the advantage of reviewing the changes in his workspace instead of reviewing a text file. He can apply the changes to his workspace and download the context (below) so that only the relevant files are shown in his package explorer. Reviewing changes in this way allows the developer to focus on only the changed code while reviewing, testing, and applying the patch.

Attach Your Context!

In this post I’ve shared with you the toolset that Eclipse and Mylyn/Tasktop offers for change sets. There are many opportunities to eliminate extra clicks and improve collaboration by taking advantage of this tooling. A great way to start using this tooling is to activate your Mylyn/Tasktop tasks and attach your context when submitting a patch. Attaching your context when submitting a patch makes it easier for other developers to review your patch, actually increasing its odds of being accepted.

Next time that you submit a patch… do not forget to check “Attach”!

Be more productive. Guaranteed.