Developers working on a large code base must keep in mind an expansive context: Source code files, configuration data, test cases, build files, and so on. A vast context could become a hinderance when the goal is to accomplish a quick, focused task, such as fixing a bug that requires access to at most a handful of code artifacts.

The open-source Mylyn project pioneered task-focused IDE interfaces that hide from view files not relevant to a task at hand. Conceived as part of Mik Kersten's university research, Mylyn has become a popular Eclipse plug-in, and is part of recent Eclipse milestone releases.

Kersten's company, TaskTop, extended Mylyn in areas that provide added value to commercial software teams. In this interview, Mik Kersten describes some new Mylyn features, as well as new capabilities available in his firm's namesake product:

Frank Sommers: Many developers are familiar with Mylyn, but few know about TaskTop. What does TaskTop add to Mylyn?

Mik Kersten: TaskTop is basically a handful of extra features on top of Mylyn: time tracking, cross-repository federation, and commercial connectors.

One thing many developers do on Fridays is to try to figure out what they did all week: Sort out the hours worked on various tasks and report those hours to their managers. We all know how annoying that is. The benefit of that reporting, of course, is that management will have the actuals—that data will tell you what took too long, and you can use that information to improve planning for your next release. While the data is useful, tracking and reporting on actual hours worked is a pain for most developers.

You can close the loop between planning and actual time tracking with TaskTop. And you can do that in a way that's friendly to developers, and that gives developers control, instead of taking a big-brother approach.

In TaskTop 1.6, we have to-the-minute time tracking and time submission on all the operating systems Mylyn supports. Mylyn, by itself, supports time tracking because it knows whether you're active in Eclipse. Because TaskTop provides browser integration, as well as integration with the operating system and Microsoft Office, TaskTop tracks the interaction with the OS as well to build up your [tasks'] context. Time tracking works similarly to your instant messenger or Skype statuses: If you're inactive on the computer, it turns time tracking off; if you're active, it turns time tracking on.

That doesn't mean that TaskTop imposes some sort of a Big Brother-approach to time tracking: Our philosophy has always been to place the control in developers' hands. Everything is turned off by default. You opt-in by turning [the time-tracking features] on. That's actually a change we made in Mylyn as well.

Because of the OS integration, time-tracking is very comprehensive. And you can also add extra time, if you spent time on a task away from the computer—looking at a white board, for instance.

The result is that you have full information on everything you've done over the lifecycle of every task. You can bring up a report for everything you've done in a time period, and you can submit that [report] to a repository that handles time tracking. Everything is stored per task. You have to submit [your time reports] manually because, as a principle, we don't ever do anything in the background.

Frank Sommers: What kind of time tracking repositories do you support?

Mik Kersten: TaskTop integrates with many issue tracking and collaboration systems that support time tracking. Bugzilla and Trac both support time tracking, for instance. You can also save your time tracking data to a CSV file, and import that to your time tracker.

One thing to remember is that you can submit your time tracking data more often than you'd do without that automation. I used to submit my time data once a week or even less often, but now I can submit that as often as I want to.

Frank Sommers: You also mentioned cross-repository linking as a new feature in TaskTop. How does that work?

Mik Kersten: Say you just picked up Rally as your software project tracking tool. But you also have ClearQuest as your old tool, and may also have customized copy of Bugzilla. You can put links between any two TaskTop-certified repositories. You can say that, This user story in ThoughtWorks depends on these four defects in Bugzilla, and on this one defect in Apache Tomcat, if you're building on Tomcat, for instance. And you can get notified inside Rally—or another agile tool you use—when those defects are resolved. We federate those task repositories.

Another common task developers face is having to create user stories from email threads. Say, you discuss some issue with a product owner, and that issue emerges into some sort of a user story. TaskTop adds the commercial integration—GMail, Outlook, Exchange—and you can just tag an Outlook email or label, or a GMail thread, as a task, and TaskTop will always incorporate that thread as user story.

What do you think of IDE-integrated task and time tracking?