Question

as VS2010 Task List only scans active file for Comment Tokens and Bookmarks may make troubles if developers have there project on different drives/paths, what would be the best way to manage open TODOs for projects where more than just two people are working on?

How do you solve such problems?

We use a Bugtracking tool but for develeopers it’s common to use such tags as “TODO” in the code. Nowadays we use PRAGMAS, but we want to get rid of them to get less warnings in our nightly test builds.

Answer 1

For proper “to-do” management, we use JIRA, but calling it “to-do” management is doing it a little disservice. When you want to manage work chains across teams, you need to start looking at third party tools.

If you want Visual Studio integration, then Visual Studio Team System is designed for this, but I’ve got no experience with it so won’t comment any more than that.

Another tool I have had experience with in the past is OnTime from Axosoft, but it has changed a lot from when I last used it. That said, when I was using it, it was quite a competent tool – I can only hope it has improved with age.

At home I use the issue tracking software in bitbucket, but this likely uses JIRA in the background as well – same parent company.

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To improve the “to-do” view in VS, you can use ReSharper. It has a to-do list that scans all files and puts them in a tree view, but it isn’t free.

Accessible via the “ReSharper -> Windows -> To-do Items” menu.

The to-do items comes with a decent amount of customization, so you can add your own literals and control how they appear in the code file (to-do is bold blue, for example). You can then apply filters to the to-do window to constrain what you are looking at.

If there is a to-do for a particular developer you could easily make a “TODO AH” tag (developer initials), then this developer can filter on his own items.

ReSharper is worth the money for possibly more reasons than I can effectively count at the moment.