Re: Completion should be effort invested instead of percentage of duration

[Kurt Maute <kurt maute us>]

On Wed, 2007-01-03 at 15:36 +0100, Maurice van der Pot wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 08:46:08PM +0100, Maurice van der Pot wrote:

Hi Maurice - 

I'm not ignoring you, just haven't had the time to give this one proper
attention.  Hopefully I'll be able to get a good look at the code and
play with it a bit this weekend (that is, if my wife doesn't torture me
too badly in her quest to take down and store all the Christmas
decorations away again).

> > Currently progress of a task is tracked by setting a percentage. 
> > 
> > There are two problems with this approach:
> > 
> > 1) Because it is a percentage of the duration and not of the work
> > associated with the task, the work done on the task would seem to vary
> > depending on how much non-working time there is between task start and
> > end. 
> ...
> > 2) If the work associated with a task is increased (because it turns out
> > to be more work than originally planned), then the time spent on it will
> > seem to increase judging from the length of the completion bar.
> 
> I have started on a patch for this issue (it's attached to this message).
> The patch adds a "Work done" field to the task dialog. "Work done" is now
> used in the Gantt chart to draw the bar within a task instead of
> "Complete".

Good idea.  That should help - especially with issue #2.  My thought is
that %complete and work done should be linked such that if the user
changes one, the other should be (optionally) recalculated (having not
looked at your patch yet, I don't know if you've got this in there.

One thing I don't like about MSP is the fact that it makes assumptions
about recalculating task fields based on user input (i.e. a date change
recalculates work).  I think we should create some way for the user to
control how the calculations are done so that if the task work field is
modified, the user has control over whether %complete gets recalculated
(work done remains same) or if %complete remains the same and work done
gets recalculated.

> I still have some questions though:
> 
> - How do you think completion should be handled for tasks with fixed
>   duration? Should the "work done" field just be interpreted as a
>   time spent for these tasks?

Same way I think.  %complete = (work done/work) *100

> - I could use some help to make sure signals are generated and handled
>   appropriately. I don't have a clear understanding of what should
>   trigger a signal in planner.

ok

> - Last, but certainly not least, what do you think of what I am
>   proposing? Is the existing 'percent-complete' useful to anyone or

As above, I think they should be logically linked.

-- 
Kurt Maute <kurt maute us>