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Tasktop boosts task-based monitoring, collaboration


By David Rubinstein
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October 26, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Agile processes give developers big productivity gains, because the project is broken down into smaller units such as new features or bug fixes—call them stories, or tasks—that eliminate the time spent navigating through a massive codebase. But a key element of this type of task-based programming is the ability to monitor that work.

Automated tracking of task artifacts and collaborations, and the time spent on working with them, is an important new feature in today's release of Tasktop 1.6 and Mylyn 3.3, the framework for managing tasks across the application life cycle.

The Mylyn project, which is led by Mik Kersten, is the open-source integration framework being built under the auspices of the Eclipse Foundation. Mylyn enables users of the Eclipse IDE to integrate with open-source life-cycle tools, such as Bugzilla, Mantis and Trac.

Tasktop, a company founded by Kersten, is the commercial offering that brings in integrations with commercial ALM tools such as Atlassian JIRA, CollabNet TeamForge and Rally. Integrations with IBM Rational and Perforce are expected later this year, according to Kersten.

“The whole task-focused interface relies on monitoring," said Kersten. "Any time a developer interacts with code, that interaction goes into the degree-of-interest model, so what they’ve done can be seen.”

Tasktop comes with ability to encode the degree of interest of program elements by monitoring the programmer's activity, and it displays the encoded model in views of the programs being written with the Eclipse IDE.

For teams using agile methodologies, this information based on actual development work gives greater visibility to project managers and enables better estimations for when tasks can be completed, Kersten pointed out.

The Tasktop interface further automates work on tasks by automatically collecting the context associated with a particular task, he explained. By bringing developers only the pieces of code, requirements and project information relevant to the task at hand, time is not spent searching for the information they need to complete the task.

Other new features that support task-based development in Tasktop 1.6 are cross-repository linking and importing, meaning tasks can be easily moved between ALM systems, such as an e-mail being converted to an agile user story. The software now includes an instant task open-and-activate feature, as well as context capturing and switching to facilitate one-click multi-tasking to retrieve the relevant information necessary to complete the task. The ability to share desktop and office documents for collaboration and retrieval has also been added, as has the ability to link Web-based documents and wiki comments to a task.


Related Search Term(s): Eclipse, Tasktop

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