Mylyn: Code at the Speed of Thought - TS-6421

DISCLAIMER:
These are the tidied up notes I took from the session at the JavaOne 2008 conference in San Francisco, California. There may well be mistakes and ommissions. I will come back and correct them once the conference has completed. However my first priority is to get the information published before the backlog gets too large and swamps me. All comments welcome. Enjoy!

Mik Kerste, Tasktop Technologies

Key Concept: Flow + Focus = :-)

It would be nice if the tools could helop you get into and maintain this state

Friction - whenever the environment stops the flow. Machine slowness, administration (configuring), constant seearching
Distraction - affects focus (IM, email, bug reports, etc.). Multitasking, Interruptions, Email/IM overload

Reduce Friction - faster CPU, Java and tool support means tools automate more plus OS's are improving

My Brain's Long Term Memory:
- Semantic Memory - understanding of facts. How we understand the JDK and libraries. Takes reinforcement to learn
- IDEs make the semantic structure of our systems explicit to help us
- But the ystems we build are not getting smaller and the tools don't filter in their tree views
- The tree views are getting more and more full. We spend more time browsing and navigating

- Episodic Memory - our personal memory. Mainly hippocampal. One shot learning memory. We don't have to try and remember it. You can lose it in trauma cases.
- How can we leverage this in IDEs? For every episode that we work on (feature, bug, ...) we only care about the subset of the system related to that episode.
- Episodes are called "tasks" and you activate them with a click. Thsi is a subtle change in your workflow. Thence all the tree views in the rest of the IDE just show what is relevant to you ("Degree of interest model")

Demo:
=> Task focussed interface - Task List View. Task Respositories (inc. gmail, SVN, CVS, Bugzilla, JIRA)
- Aim to make everything sub 200ms reaction time - cached locally and synched offline
- Concept of incoming and outgoing changes
- All built on eclipse SWT and Workbench
- You can set up searches to find tasks (i.e. all open for release 3.0)
- Concept of working sets - so you can have a single task list but with different perspective

Task Context:
- Select and activate - Package explorer now just shows all the code I was working on when I last worked on the task. The task context.
- When I navigate around the editor, the relevant pieces in the navigator update and expand
- To see everything you can ALT-click something (but this is usually hidden)
- The context is autoamtically stored
- The degree of interest model decays. The more interesting something is, the more it decats
- When I deactivate and then reactivate a task, it remembers exactly where I was, right down to the eclipse extensions, what code I had selected, etc.

Collaboration:
- Synchronise view now grouped by task so I can commit just one task. Mylyn can write the commit message for you. (You can edit these in the preferences window)
- I can make a patch for the changeset in a right click
- Now changesets are units
- SVN history can be linked to the code and so now the change history is explicit in your code and easy to navigate to / from it
- Task contexts are sharable

Eclipse Europa:
- Now bundled in Eclipse Europa
- It is based on a framework:
- It needs to support tasks and the resources that you use
- Bugzilla and Java Reference Implementations - functionality bootstrapped from here
- Community provided JIRA connector
- Trac from Google code
- Projects outside Mylyn built on the APIs - Gmail, Gcal, browser, FogBugz, Outlook, Subclipse, Subversive, SpringIDE, Mantis, CodeBeamer, RT and more
- org.eclipse.mylyn
- core, rcp, sdk - Standard Eclipse platform
- monitor.core (monitors user ineration)
- cnoetxt.core (degree of interest etc.) and tasks.core (tasks and offline access)
- monitor.ui, context.ui, tasks.ui, and to integrate for example with Jira - jira.ui
- (extend into the IDE) monitor.usage, resources.ui, team.ui, team.cvs, ide.ui, java.ui

Summary:
- Tasks become a first class part of the UI

NOTE: Rally - brings Agile terminology into the Task list (user stories etc.)