GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 167521
RFE: Better concurrent/sequential task handling
Last modified: 2009-05-21 23:50:32 UTC
Version details: 0.12.1 Distribution/Version: Mandrake 10.1 When using imendio for projects whose component tasks take up much or all of the actor's time, you tend to need one task to come after the next. Imendio as it is, doesn't support sequential tasks very well, and assumes a concurrent task system (to the point that I can hardly work with it). Here are some possible suggestions: 1. Have a global radio option of "Assume tasks are concurrent" and "Assume tasks are sequential". When the sequential option is selected, tasks ordered higher in the list would come before tasks lower in the list. Tasks would automatically bump to when they could first be done, and the overall project time would reflect correctly. 2. Have two differert mouse drags. Regular dragging a mouse to associate two tasks would say, "These are sequential but don't depend on each other." No dependency arrow would be drawn, and if the task reassigned or there is a task inserted before it, then the task's tenative starting time would be bumped to the appropriate place. The other would be Shift+Drag which would say, "Associate these as an old-style one-is-a-prerequisite-of-the-other."
That was ambiguous. When I'm describing the mouse actions, and I write that a dragging action would "say" something, I mean that those mouse actions would essentially do that. I don't mean that it would pop up some dialog or have a tooltip or anything
This should be handled by some kind of resource usage algorithm in my opinion. So if you specify that the maximum resource usage is 100%, tasks would be moved so that the resources only work 100%, and the priority field should decide the order. Would that work for you?
I agree with Richard's approach. In addition, in PS Scheduler it is possible to manually change the day-to-day allocation of resources to a task. This is sometimes necessary when you have 2 resources on a task and the auto-balancing like Richard proposes does something like have one resource assigned 100% for the first half the task and the 2nd resource assigned 100% for the second half... if the task is such that the resources must work together, this is wrong and must be manually entered. Even if auto-balancing is too complicated for now, allowing for manual entry of resource usage from day to day on individual tasks would let us manually balance at least. For example, if TaskA has 10 days of work, I'd like to be able to specificy that ResourceP will expend 100% for the first 5 days, then 50% for the next 10 days to complete the task.
I had the same problem with Planner, which I commented in the user's mailing list here: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.apps.planner.user/497 Later, I had to switch to Microsoft Project 2000 because of interoperability with other participants in the project (BTW, I could possibly have avoided the switch if I had been able to export MS Project from planner) and I've realized that it has a feature that's works ok to solve this: it's called Resource Leveling and works by delaying tasks when overallocation occurs. The part I like is that this information is kept apart from real constraints, so I can wipe it just by using "Clear Leveling" option. Perhaps that could serve as inspiration.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 132917 ***