On Twitter, the Eclipse PDE lead commented on a neat feature of Mylyn that I hadn’t seen before: the ability to add issues/bugs into your issue tracker directly from the “Problems” view. I wanted to see if you could do this from the “Tasks” view if you entered “TODO” comments into your CFML, and sure enough, it works. As of this writing, CFEclipse supports TODO tasks but ColdFusion Builder does not. Please consider voting for this feature request.
What I love about this feature is that you can fairly seamlessly create tasks and attach your context for that new task in less than a minute. When executives yammer on about “Work Smarter, Not Harder”, Mylyn features such as this exemplify the “work smarter” mentality. The point here is that you reduce friction in two areas: 1) creating the task with relevant information, 2) sharing your context with the developer to whom you’re assigning the task.
Reduced friction == Increased Productivity.
Here’s how:
In Words:
- In CFEclipse, enter a TODO comment in your source code, Something like <!--- TODO: make this thing actually work --->
- Open the “Tasks” view – notice your TODO is now in the that view as a new task
- Right click on that table row, and select “New Task from Marker”
- This will bring up the screens necessary to add the issue to your issue tracker (or enter as a “Local task” if not using an issue tracker)
To then attach that file as the “context” for the issue:
- Activate the new task
- Navigate back to your file that contains the “TODO”. This file will now be part of the context for the issue
- In the Issue editor, go to the “context” tab and click the “Attach Context…” link. Follow the steps to completion
- Note that this is the same thing I wrote about previously
Now, when the developer to whom the issue is assigned (even if it’s you) opens this issue, they’ll be able to retrieve the context and get working on the file you want them to work on without having to navigate a single tree.
If this ain’t Jedi effect smoothness, I don’t know what is.
Happy Coding.