"Chris Nelson" <[email protected]> writes:

> Greg Troxel wrote:
>>    2. Task A is composed of tasks B and C.  A's estimated time is the
>>    total of B's and C's.
>> 
>> This makes sense, and I think it would be good to have support for
>> this independent of a gantt plugin. 
>
> Yes.  I agree.  It would be a nice piece of separate functionality that
> a Gantt plugin could require.  Shall we call it CompositeTicket for the
> purposes of discussion?

There is already on the wiki

  http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/SubTickets

This seems ok, but perhaps overly complicated.  I see this being either
very much like a second copy of MasterTickets, or a modification to
MasterTickets to add a new column to the dependency table to distinguish
between blocks and is-part-of.  It seems like almost the same thing
mechanically as blocking/blocked-by, with a property on each dependency
saying which kind it is.

>> nit: Task A might have hours for A, in addition to subtasks B and C.
>> You might want to ban this by policy, but it makes sense for some
>> people. 
>
> If A is do B and C and spend time coordinating them, I'd argue that that
> coordination is task D.  (Though I admit that time might be concurrent
> with A and B.  Maybe the solution is to pad tasks B and C for the
> management overhead in coordinating them.)  But I really wouldn't want
> to have time in a task that's decomposed into other tasks.

This is probably a reasonable view, but what you're doing is making
decisions about what kinds of project management rules people can have
and still use the SubTickets and TimingAndEstimation plugins.  But, all
it forces is for people to make one more ticket to have the work that
would have been in the parent ticket, and that probably makes life
simpler more than it hurts.

>> In the requirements, it's not clear to me if the scheduling is
>> supposed to be resource aware or not.  ...
>
> That's a good question.  As long as it's isolated in a plugin and not
> tangling up the core, I don't know that it's a bad thing that the Gantt
> plugin is resource aware.  Or maybe there's a Resource Leveling plugin
> that requires the Gantt plugin.  (And a Project Management package that
> bundles TimingAndEstimation, MasterTicket, CompositeTicket, Gantt, and
> Resource.)

I think it would be the other way around, that Gantt would require
Scheduling, but one could view that as one of Gantt's core jobs.  To me,
the whole point is to look at all the data of what needs to be done and
generate a valid schedule.  Displaying the schedule is necessary to
understand the data, but isn't the main point.

Can you explain a use case for Gantt without Scheduling?  How would
dates be chosen for drawing?  Why would this make any sense?
(Not trying to be difficult - I really do not get it.)

>>    3. Tasks A and B start at the same time
>>    4. Tasks A and B must end at the same time
>> 
>> I don't think this is realistic from the reality point of view.  
>
> I have an associate who's a certified project planner and he couldn't
> come up with examples of those uses either, though he confirmed that
> they are considered valid to project management weenies.

There is the notion of a start time, and then the more important notion
of how many hours of each resource are applied in each period.  If it's
started but has no resources, then it doesn't mean much.

But, if we extend MasterTickets to have a dependency type, these could
be expressed easily enough.

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