At Atlassian Summit 2010, Heather Mardis and Brian Tarbox of Motorola shared the story of their team’s adoption of Atlassian tools.
My favorite part of the talk was their demonstration of how to use Eclipse, Mylyn and Jira.
Mylyn tracks ‘task contexts’ that allow you to quickly switch between multiple tasks and pick up where you left off more easily, and using the Atlassian Connector for Eclipse allows you to attach a Mylyn task context to a Jira issue. Mylyn will record all the source files and methods you touched for a particular task, so that when you return to the task, you see the source you were working on, rather than your entire project tree. It’s a huge time saver!
The Motorola team has taken advantage of Mylyn contexts to create ‘training tasks’ for remote team members. If a developer wants to explain the implementation of a particular feature, they can simply create a new Mylyn task, touch the source files and methods involved in the feature, and then save the task context to an appropriately names Jira issue.
This is an incredibly clever usage of Mylyn and Jira that every development team could quickly take advantage of.
Here’s a video of the presentation. If you want to cut to the chase, the demo of how to create task contexts starts around 31 minutes in.
Want to check out the slides too?
Check out the slides and video at the Atlassian Summit 2010 website!
