Tasktop

Mylyn 2.3 is now now available along with the Europa Winter Update. Check the New & Noteworthy for the listing of features and performance improvements. The next major release is Mylyn 3.0, which will go out with Ganymede at the end of June.

This release includes a very nice contribution from Willian Mitsuda, whose screenshot annotation feature makes it easier for users to communicate bugs and enhancement requests. For details on other great community contributions, such as Frank Becker’s ongoing stream of patches, see the New & Noteworthy.

This release also addresses a key Task List usability problem. Mylyn makes it very easy to create and collaborate with tasks. As a result, you can quickly end up with a large number of tasks in your Task List. To address this, we previously added the Focus on Workweek facility and made task scheduling an optional but core part of the Task List UI. For the most part this worked, but there were days when it felt like we were spending way too many clicks on scheduling. Those days tended to be Mondays, when tasks over-optimistically scheduled for the previous week would all turn red and needed to be re-scheduled. At first we though that this was a sensible best practice to encourage, but there are two problems with this assumption.

The first problem comes up when the start of the week is so busy that there isn’t time to get organized. We added the Scheduled presentation to the Task List which can help, but doesn’t solve the whole problem. The second problem is a deeper one. As Kent Beck pointed out in Extreme Programming Explained, optimism is an occupational hazard of programming. This means that many of us schedule too much for the future. We termed the resulting symptom “red mondays” (see bug 206566). When your UI ends up with a large portion of the visible elements colored red for a large number of users, there is something wrong.

The crux of the problem is the fact that there simply aren’t enough days in the week. When a task comes in that you know you want to get done, you may want to get it done this week, but with ever-changing priorities you may not know what day you can get to it. So we added one more day to the week that comes after Sunday and called it “Someday”. Since then, the running joke at Tasktop has been “sure, I’ll get that done on Someday”.

In the Mylyn UI the “Someday” date shows up as “This Week”. In other words, you can schedule things for “Someday This Week”. This is a floating date that moves from week to week and promises to never go red on you. This floating date has no notion of the past or going overdue, which in the end means a lot less manual maintenance of your Task List. Try it out and let us know what you think.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Eclipse, Mylyn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.