Re: Any news?

Le Thu, Apr 10, 2003 at 11:32:14PM +0200, Mikael Hallendal:
> 
> Hi!
> 
> Sorry but we have been hogged the last couple of days, we just haven't
> had time to look at it. Looks interesting though, a few quick comments.
> 
> We should probably use some other color than the one use in the Gantt
> chart (to make it obvious they are showing different things).

I did use the same color juste because... it's obviously the same
thing :-)

By the way, right now, you cannot have something like that:
Task 1 assigned to Resource 1 from day 1 to day 10
Task 1 assigned to Resource 2 from day 1 to day 5
Task 1 assigned to Resource 3 from day 6 to day 8
and so on...

So, when a task is shown in the "ttable" view, it's exactly the
same as in the gantt... The only real difference is the *ordering*
which is on resources, and no on tasks, and a few things getting
simpler from that (one can predict the depth of the tree, and nodes
at different depth are holding object of different types, and so on)

> In the future we probably want to share a lot of code between the views
> to avoid duplication.

Can be of interest between ttable and gantt. A real large part of
the code is similar.

> Out of curiosity, what is the "Resource Usage"-view?

Well, hard for me to explain in english. Let's try...

Case 1: Suppose you work on a given task 1 day per week
        (let's say weekly meeting with the marketing on monday).
	MrProject is able to say that you work on this task 20%
	of your time, which is not true: you work 100% of your
	time on this task, but 20% of the week.
Case 2: In the planning, it is supposed that Task is going to last
        for 20 days, and to use 10 days of work (thus, a 50%
	assignment). Afterward, while realising the project, you see
	that you spent 20 days, but to a 75% load.
	How to display that?

In a more general fashion, the idea is to have two kind of informations:
- "planned": that are computed before the project begin, or, just
  before "now"
- "real": what happened really.

For each assignment, there is a list of "resource-usages" which are
defined to be 100% on time-basis:
- hourly
- daily
- weekly
- monthly

So, a 20% assignment can be done by:
- 1 resource-usage every monday
  none on the other 4 days
or
- 1 resource-usage during one week
  none on the other next 3 weeks,
  2 hours on the last day of the month.

You see the idea?

So, this view is a resource list, for each resource, a list of it's
assignment. On the right side, a table showing for each unit of time
what the resource is/was planned to do, and what the resource did
really.

It allows you to:
- establish a precise resource allocations
- show precisely where you resources ares over-loaded
- have quality information on what went wrong with your project.

So, based on the same information, one can create a new view:
"quality indicators" which contain:
- which task did use more resource than planed to
- which task ended late
- which resources usage where different than the one planed
and so on.

This is a bit difficult to do, since it requieres some patches
on libmrproject:
- create the "MrpResuse"
- create the functions to use it and to combine it with resources,
  tasks, and assignments
- read/write those informations.

This view is really far from finished, so, if you think it's a bad/good
idea, it would be interesting for me to know... and to have opinions on
that kind of thing.

Regards,

	Benjamin.