Either You Succeed or Explain

OmniFocus as a Development Management System

I'm developing software and most of the time I'm working by myself. This does not mean that I don't need to organize my work. As we all know, setting goals and staying focused is crucial. That is a challenge for me - I'm usually bursting with ideas for features and enhancements. I need to prioritize and keep tabs on what I'm doing. Still, I don't want to lose any good ideas for the future.

This is where OmniFocus comes to the rescue. OmniFocus, is, IMHO, the best task management software I've used. It is Mac only and it is based on the well known Getting Things Done method, aka GTD. I'm not a strict GTD follower, yet, I still get everything I need from OmniFocus. In this post, I'll show you how to turn OmniFocus into a development management system for tracking development tasks and bugs. For teams of developers, it cannot replace a full blown system like Bugzilla. However, if you're like me, working in a one man team (no sharing option in OmniFocus) this could be a great solution. Before we start, I recommend reading a bit about GTD if you're not familiar with its' basic concepts.

Overview
Here's an example of my "Planning View"

My system is based on the following:

• Product versions are shown as Folders (for grouping projects)
• Each version will have the following projects:
  • Active Projects - Bugs and Enhancements
  • On Hold Projects - Waiting tasks - organized into 3 projects according to priority
  • On Hold Task List - Ideas for the future
  • Complete Task List - I drop finished tasks here to clear the clutter
• I have contexts according to the product modules:
  • Main Context is called 'Dev' - to distinguish from my personal tasks
  • Under 'Dev' I have a hierarchy of modules like Front End and Back End, under Front End I'll have all the flows, etc.
• Tasks usually have tags: when entering a task, I'll usually start with a tag, like [bug], [check], [idea], etc. This helps categorizing tasks later, but not a necessity.

Entering Tasks
I usually use the Quick Entry window to enter new tasks. The great thing about it is that I can invoke at any given time, jot down an idea, bug or just something that I need to check later, and immediately get it out of my head. I usually add a task note which contains as many details as I think I'll need to understand my original idea. I also enter a context (see hereunder), but not a project - so it will remain in my inbox for review.

If you want to include screen shots, you can just add it as a note to the task. I find that Skitch is the perfect companion for that, since it provides simple tools for easy annotations. You don't need to save the file, either, you can just drag it from Skitch to your OmniFocus item.

Working
I use either the Planning view or the Context View for that. I find the Planning View more natural for that. At the early days of the version you can decide to focus on Enhancements and proceed to bug fixes. That's why I find the separation to projects helpful. If I have a of lower priority, which I'm not interested in working on, I just push it to one of the Waiting projects according to its' priority.

When fixing bugs, the separation to Enhancements and Bugs becomes even more helpful as I usually have the tendency to get carried away and work on enhancements instead of fixing bugs. I have one super-task inside the Bugs project which I call "Can't Reproduce". Here I drop bug that I can't reproduce for some reason. You can also have a separate task list for that.

Contexts
The organization for contexts is critical here. When entering the context for a task I try to find the one that best fits. However, if I have a task for fixing something across the system, it will have a more general context, maybe even the top 'Dev' context.

One of the major benefits of this system is the ability to work by context. Clearly, if you have a large system, you cannot keep it all "in your head". This means that, when you're starting to work on some module, weather it is on an enhancement or a bug fix, you're going to spend some time to reacquaint yourself with the code.

When working by context, you can group tasks dealing with the same module and perform them together. Conceptually, it's the basic reason for having contexts like "@home" or "@supermarket" in GTD. You want to gather all the tasks which are relevant to your current context. That's exactly why module is the same: since I'm here, let's be productive and do everything which is in the vicinity, which is in the same context.

Review
From this point forward, it's basic GTD stuff. I have a daily review of my current tasks and I set up goals in terms of due dates. I have weekly reviews for reviewing all (hopefully) my tasks, promoting, demoting and eliminating the tasks no longer relevant.

Conclusion
I presented a way for turning OmniFocus into an effective development management system. What I like the most about this system:

• The ability to quickly get things off my mind, knowing they won't be lost.
• Gathering work by modules, i.e. contexts.
• The outlining ability - breaking tasks into smaller and smaller sub-tasks. I think this is the main selling point of OmniFocus specially.

Hope this works for you, too. Good luck.

Eclipse 3.4 Hidden Treasures

Eclipse 3.4 "Ganymede" will be released in the upcoming days. I've been working with the RC builds for some time now and I like it. Eclipse 3.4 is a better IDE and a more robust platform than its' predecessor. In this post, I've gathered some new features which I like and may be "off the beaten path".

Rich Hovers
This is not a hidden feature, but I had to mention it. The Java Development Tools include some interesting enhancements in this release. The greatest innovation is the Java Editor Breadcrumbs. It looks cool, but, after using it for some time, I didn't find it very useful. The Rich Hovers, on the other hand,  are very useful. I especially like the Javadoc hovers. There's an emphasis in making the documentation accessible and that's a very positive improvement.
Another useful rich hover is the Java debug hover which makes it easier to view the contents of compound objects without having to copy them to the expressions view. You can use the preferences to determine whether the behavior of the "enriched hovers".

The Dropins Folder
If you paid attention to the hype around Eclipse 3.4, you've heard the term P2. In simple terms, it's a new way of deploying Eclipse applications and plug-ins. For the average Eclipse user, the most noticeable change will be a new "Software Update" dialog which replaces the previous "Find & Install..." and "Manage Configuration" duo. It's a much better UI and it's a promising future to Eclipse updates.

Part of this change is "the dropins folder". This folder is located in your Eclipse distribution folder and it is initially empty. In this folder you can manually drop features and plugins which will be installed once you restart Eclipse. No more restarting with "-clean" option. There's also an option of using this folder to link to a central location of plugins, which can be shared among several Eclipse installations. I'll write a dedicated post about it in the future.

Templates View
One of the late features to make it into the Eclipse 3.4. Templates can be inserted while coding, usually using the content assistant. Adding and editing templates was possible before. In Eclipse 3.4 there's a new view which shows all possible templates and makes it easier to add new templates. There are also some new parameters which can be used when composing template. Templates are already an important feature. The templates view makes this feature even more user friendly, especially for customizations.
The view is found in the views under "General" - "Templates". Look in the Eclipse help for more details on the template variables.

Format Only Edited Lines
The "Save Actions" is one of my favorite features in Eclipse 3.3 (read my original post about it). In Eclipse 3.4 there are several improvements including some new formatting features. One of the complaints against the Save Actions feature was that it will change the entire file, thus, making it very hard to compare to previous revisions when using a source control. It can become very annoying if some team members use it and some don't.

For that purpose there's a new feature which allows changing just the edited lines, keeping the rest of the file intact. I highly recommend using the Save Actions feature. It is inactive by default, so go ahead and activate it.

Outline View Drag & Drop
This is a true hidden treasure. You can now easily rearrange your source code by dragging and dropping elements in the outline view. AFAIK, this currently works for Java and for XMLs. To use it, make sure the "sort" option is not selected and just drag & drop.

Plug-in Spy
There are many new features in the Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) project which makes writing and deploying Eclipse plugins much easier. The Plug-in spy is a true hidden gem in this stack. One of the best ways to learn how to write plug-ins is to read the code of existing plug-ins. Naturally, the organic Eclipse plug-ins make great candidates. You see a view and you want to create something similar. The question is: how do you find the code behind that view?

This is where the plug-in spy comes into play. Invoke the plug-in spy and you'll get all the information that you need to start exploring the existing code. The plug-in spy can be invoked using the keyboard shortcut Shit+Option+F1 (Alt+Shift+F1 on Windows). It works on views and in dialogs as well, including the wizard and preferences dialog.

Error Log View
The error log view is not new. It shows platform errors and informational messages. It was greatly improved in Eclipse 3.4, with a search box and a grouping feature. It's all good, but, there's one cool feature tucked away in the toolbar. You can quickly use the log view to view the logs of workspaces you launched when running or debugging plug-ins. It shows all the defined launch configuration. Each launch configuration is associated with a runtime workspace. The log of this workspace will be shown when that configuration is selected.

Export/Import Launch Configurations

Launch configurations are an important part of the workspace. Every once in a while I start over and create a new workspace after having too much garbage in the old one. Importing the projects is a breeze. It's the configuration that takes time. Most of the configuration can be exported and imported and now the launch configuration are included. Since creating launch configurations can be time consuming, this is a much needed feature. Start from the "File" menu and select the "Export" feature. Select the "Launch Configurations" and in the next dialog box select the configurations to export. The result is a folder of XMLs which can be later imported to any workspace.

God is in the Details
The features I mentioned above are mostly major feature. Eclipse 3.4 also includes an assortment of small improvements for making your life easier. The content assistant, for example, is improved, and it works in cases where it didn't before. Argument name guessing is much improved and can now also guess methods which may be called to produce the arguments (e.g. getters). There are many new feature you'll discover once you start using the new version. "Ganymede" is a great release for the Eclipse platform.

Silent June

This is my first post for June and June is almost over. I had a lot to say, so it's not that I was out of ideas for posts. The main reason is that I'm working hard on pushing a beta version of my product out the door. I'm ironing out the final bugs and soon I'll be ready to start a private beta. I'm doing my best to start testing it publicly as fast as I can. 

I have a lot on my mind these days. For me, coding was the easy part. The road ahead is going to be the real challenge. It is suffice to say that this phase will only be complete once I'll get the first payment for my launched product. Seems like a long way to go. I'll share some of these challenges in my blog.

On a different note, we're now officially in the summer. Spring brought rejuvenation to my workspace: I upgraded to Leopard, switched to Firefox 3 and started developing using Eclipse 3.4, which is still in RC status. I have a lot to say on all of these products and I'll be blogging about it soon. However, if you're reading this using Firefox 2 than just stop right there and download Firefox 3 now. I'll just say it feels like I bought an extra gigabyte of RAM. 

P.S. If you're in Israel and interested in seeing my product in action, drop me a line and we can meet for a one-on-one demonstration. I'll be happy to get some first hand feedback.