When I was trying to install an update for an eclipse plugin, I noticed that there were couple of mylyn related stuff present and I had no idea where they came from.. but later realized that it was bundled along with eclipse europa and later versions. Didnt bother much that time.. but couple of days later, ran into a developerworks article that was talking about how mylyn makes you even more productive. That sprouted my curiosity and I took a dig into what it was about. Played around with it a little bit.. and Boy, was I glad to have run into mylyn! It REALLY DOES make you MUCH MORE productive and more focussed.
And its very simple to use as well.
All you need to do is create a new local task (if you dont have a repository setup) and give it a due date, schedule date (based on ur schedule) and a priority. Activate the task and thats pretty much it! From there on, any file that you open to work on are automatically associated with the currently active mylyn task.. and it also makes it easy on you by removing the files that were closed and that havent been edited, but opened for a long time. Another beauty is that it even associates (displays in package explorer) only the methods that were accessed, which means you dont have to really get lost with sorting through the various classes that are present in your project and even the numerous methods in a class that have no relevance to the task you're working on currently! Finally, since mylyn integrates with CVS, if you have eclipse hooked up to CVS, you'll see that when its time to checkin the changes, all the classes impacted by the task you worked on are automatically grouped for you, making it much easier to group check in the files that were updated for a specific fix or for a new change. Just awesome! No more hassle of trying to figure out which files were changed for which task.. especially when you're working on multiple tasks in a huge project. It also tracks the amount of time spent on each task after its activated.. again making it easy for you to provide an estimate or provide better estimates of time spent on each task (for micro-managing bosses). Im yet to play around with the bug tracking feature.. but I already know that Im gonna love that as well.. even if I dont, Im gonna continue using mylyn from now on for creating my personal tasks.. Please give it a try and fall in love with it.
Here's the link that got me onto mylyn:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-mylyn1/
Adios.
Arun
