During a course at the university (Human Aspects of Software Engineering, by Prof. Thomas Fritz), Claudio Anliker and I got the chance to develop a small application to help the developer in his daily tasks. Our result is a Visual Studio add-in that extends the representation and management of task annotations (=todos):
It is common practice that developers use task annotations in their code to improve its readability and the communication between team-members. Their fast creation makes them easy to forget, as there is usually no connection to a planning tool and only a limited view to manage them available. We introduce a new approach by connecting task annotations with an agile planning tool, improving their rep- resentation by adding contextual information and extending their default view. This approach aims to extend the very limited possibilities present in current modern IDEs such as Visual Studio, but also to keep the lightweight characteristics. An operability study and a small-scale evaluation shows the approach’s great potential, despite its prototype nature and many possibilities and ideas for future work.
You may read our report here.
