Why should I use Mylyn?

Question

I would like to present a case to our stakeholders of why I would want to use Mylyn. Can you suggest any links to any convincing use-cases, documentation or tutorials that would convince a non-technical audience what Mylyn is, and why their team should be using it.

I'm not looking for buzzword compliance or technical detail on how it works (so http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/ is a little of both of these) but a value-proposition, ease of use, and a quick set of use-cases for it.

Answer 1

This article in IBM developerWorks has a nice description: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-mylyn1/

And I enjoyed the webcast on Mylyn in http://tasktop.com/videos/mylyn/webcast-mylyn-3.0.html.

Hope it helps!

Eduard

Answer 2

Mylyn, in how I experience it, is to help me focus. The biggest gain is when doing task switches, going from feature, to bug and back to feature. First time I did that with Mylyn I remebered a bit about Human Task Switches Considered Harmful. With Mylyn I was able to switch much faster.

The task focus is easy and comes without any setup. Integrating Mylyn with your team, like sharing tasks, sharing lists, assignments and milepoint planning. That takes time to setup, that is probably something you'll need to pitch.

Answer 3

What I like of using Mylyn is the integration between Bugzilla and SVN. Now it is to me a lot easier to commit changes, because I don't have to manually track to which bugs do they belong. Also task switching is now a lot easier. The fact that the repository is filtered to show me only the related classes is a real time saver when working with the huge code base we have in the system.

Answer 4

If you work on several tasks (more than 3 or 4) at the same time and your context switching is more frequent, then you must be careful to "activate" the right task before you open the related files.

For example, let's say you are working on task A and suddenly got an email related to task B for which you need to look at some task B related files. You must remember to first "activate" task B in mylyn and then open those files. Otherwise Mylyn will associate those files with task A because you opened them while in the context of task A.

So if you have more frequent context switching, Mylyn can be a bit of an irritant sometimes.

Answer 5

Jamesh, Tasktop is the full-featured product that is built on the Mylyn framework. You can find the top reasons why your team should adopt Tasktop/Mylyn at http://tasktop.com/solutions. This content is suitable for your non-technical audience.

Here's a brief summary:

• Dramatic developer productivity gains resulting from the task-focused interface, which reduces information overload and facilitates multitasking
  
• Streamlined team communication and expertise sharing made possible by integrating your bug/issue tracking system with the developer's IDE
  
• Project managers and team leads can monitor project status efficiently using the rich task editor and incoming change notifications
  
• Automatic tracking and reporting of time spent on each issue makes it easy for developers to submit accurate time sheets

If I can provide assistance with presenting and demonstrating these benefits, please let me know.

Wesley Coelho
Tasktop Technologies
[email protected]