Tooling idea for Getting things done with teams

Roughly 1½ year ago I produce a plugin for team-system to allow me to report bugs quickly though as I’m working with the code. The idea behind it was from the Fogbugzintoruction video where I think its Joel Spolsky who says something along the lines of “it should take less than 30 seconds to report a bug, else the lazy developer wont do it.”

The resulting plugin was a short-command that started up a UI with a single textbox on it. I wrote the “bug”, and it created an bug item in Team System with my specified title. It also made sure to “record” the context of where I was in the code when I wrote the item. In this case, file and line-number.

In a previous post I discussed how to get things done with teams.

Consider having such a plugin to your IDE that will report the item generated to a central inbox, central for all developers. The item could be a bug, it could also be a suggestion for refactoring, request for more tests, idea for a new feature and much much more.

With such tooling in place, a team could quickly shed some light on issues that aren’t directly related for the delivery of the current iteration. But more related on the values of the team or the ongoing quality of the code product. The issues can be reviewed and managed during a weekly meeting, resulting in product backlog items, sprint backlog items, discussions, meetings. Or just a sense of common values within the team.