Effective Task Management using Mylyn

I always see a gap or a failure of connectivity between the planned tasks (after you identified the WBS, Work Breakdown Structure) and the actual execution of it. Though we have good project management tools, it’s difficult for us to track/record the tasks activities and its contents apart from the name of the task in your project management tool.

In Other words, once the tasks are planned by the project lead or project manager then the task execution will be performed by the developers. Now how effective it is for you to track/record/manage the task activities, contents, effort or time for a given task to developers. Also how frequent the developers are reusing the past efforts or remembering the tasks performed earlier in your environment. Many of these questions related to developer task management still remains open.

It’s necessary for us to glue/gel the gap with the help of an effective tool so that we can keep the connectivity and evidence the task activities. I recently came across the open-source tool called ‘Mylyn’ which claims the importance of effective task management for developers and also the organized way of working for developers with the help of an industry standard IDE, Integrated Development Environment called ‘Eclipse’.

Eclipse and Mylyn are the right combination to make the task management easier for developers. The following are some of the primary advantages that I see with the effective task management using Mylyn and Eclipse.

Recording the task activity helps us to reuse it whenever needed in future.
It reduces the reviewer time drastically.
It also improves the developer productivity.
It educates the organized way of working to the developer community.
It reduces the collaboration communication burden.
It helps the developer to be focused on his tasks.

I personally experienced the effective task management in my projects by piloting the Mylyn tool using an Eclipse IDE and monitoring the pros and cons of the tool. Moreover this helps me to convince our clients in terms of the assured productivity improvements.

There are two good articles presented through IBM from the Mylyn team explaining the tool features and its usage. The following are the links.

Part#1, http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-mylyn1/
Part#2, http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-mylyn2

I hope this benefits you as well if you are from the family of JAVA.