robertelves

Introduction

Hi, I'm Robert Elves. A number of years ago I worked as a network technician. My day consisted of installing and maintaining computer networks and supporting the day to day software needs of a number of legal, accounting, and government sites. Having seen many people struggle daily with software systems I decided to drop the support role in favor of design.

After completing my M.Sc. at the University of Victoria I joined Mik Kersten and Gail Murphy on the Mylyn project at the University of British Columbia. Together we have since launched a new company, Tasktop Technologies.

Professional

Tasktop Technologies - enabling the task focused desktop

In March of 2007 the creators of Mylyn launched Tasktop Technologies. The Tasktop, our flagship product, extends Mylyn's task-focused paradigm beyond the Eclipse workbench to the Windows and Mac desktop. For knowledge workers this means that soon you too can experience the joy and productivity gains s e e n when working with a task-focused user interface!

Mylyn - code at the speed of thought

In January 2006 I joined Gail Murphy and Mik Kersten on the Mylyn project. Mylyn is an Eclipse plug-in that helps reduce information overload by only displaying information related to the developer's current task. Developers work on projects that can consist of thousands of artifacts. Bugs and feature enhancements on these projects rarely require interaction with all artifacts in the project, but rather a sub-set unique to the particular task. Mylyn makes this subset explicit by capturing the developer's interaction in what we call a task context. As the context is built up un-interesting artifacts are filtered from view. Switching between tasks becomes a snap - upon activating a previously active task only those artifacts previously interacted with are displayed.

The value of Mylyn is more easily seen than described. To get a quick look at Mylyn, see the online webinar. If you are a developer using the Eclipse IDE, please try out the latest release.

As a committer on Mylyn's Tasks Framework I help maintain and extend apis that enabled rich integration of repository tasks within the Eclipse IDE:

Task synchronization infrastructure handles the complexity of task state changes
Generic offline storage of repository task data to support offline editing of tasks
Task editor enabling rich Eclipse Forms based task editing

As component owner of the Bugzilla Connector, I'm responsible for maintaining and improving integration with the Bugzilla issue repository. When the Bugzilla Connector is installed along with the Mylyn Task List, developers are able to naturally interact with Bugzilla bugs from within the Eclipse development environment.

Bugs ( 'Tasks' in Mylyn parlance) have first class representation in the Mylyn Task List
Create, edit, and submit Bugzilla tasks from the comfort of a native Eclipse editor
Stay aware of external changes to tasks through notification (i.e. incoming status revealed in the Task List) Free your inbox!
Create Bugzilla queries in the Task List to monitor yours and/or others' tasks

Events

EclipseCon 2007
CSCW 2006 Banff, Alberta (Mylyn poster / demonstration)

Publications / Other

Aug 2008 - Tasktop for Eclipse - Get More out of Mylyn (dzone) (tasktop.com)
Jan 2008 - Interviewed by Bruno Silva of Brazil - Mylyn, Eclipse
Janice Singer, Robert Elves, Margaret-Anne Storey, "NavTracks: Supporting Navigation in Software," iwpc, pp. 173-175, 13th International Workshop on Program Comprehension (IWPC'05), 2005. [doi]
Scott, A., L. Izquierdo, S. Gupta, R. Elves, and D. Damian, Leveraging design patterns in global software development, Proc. of the Int. Workshop on Distributed Software Engineering, Paris, Aug. 2005.
Janice Singer, Robert Elves, Margaret-Anne Storey, "NavTracks: Supporting Navigation in Software Maintenance," icsm, pp. 325-334, 21st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'05), 2005. [doi]

Personal

Photography (I've posted some favorites on Flickr)
Soccer / Tennis
Skiing / Snowboarding / Hiking