Faster the good way.

So going faster never turns out well, at least that has been my message. I have been wrong about that. Using tools that help you execute tasks quicker, is a great way to improve productivity. They will actually improve your quality, by making trivial tasks easier.

Pretty much every developer who writes lots of JUnits learns the shortcut key to rerun a test. In my environment Eclipse it is Ctrl-F11. This simple savings of 2 or 3 seconds is important. It allows a pair to continue working without having to pause and search through a bunch of menu items.

So how can you become faster without creating a mess? Try learning the tools you have available to you. Pretty much every good desktop application has menus with all sorts of shortcut keys. Learn them, people didn't add them because it seemed like a good idea. Simply put they allow the experienced user to perform their job quicker.

Eclipse has a great plug in called mousefeed. Download it here: http://www.mousefeed.com/

This plugin will let you know when you select a menu item that has a menu shortcut. It gives a nice little tip that displays the shortcut keys you should have used. You can also change the tip to become a rule. So the next time you click the same menu item, you get the same popup with the action disabled. The only way to get the action to occur is to use the handy shortcut keys. This might slow you down for a short period, but the long term gain is well worth it.

If I still used the menu bars to execute JUnits, I would have wasted hours of my day by now. If you ran 50 JUnits in an hour and the key stoke saved 2 seconds, you saved over a minute. That is real savings.

There is another great tool for time savings called Infinitest, but I will get to that at another time. For now, you can focus on one easy task... Kill The Mouse!