Features:Voting

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Feature voting

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Feature	Total votes	Your votes
Resource Leveling	33
Shared Resource Database	27
Task workload: Impact of resource availability on task duration	68
Part-time resources	37
Project portfolio	26
Project templates	17
Search everywhere	10
Burn-down chart	13
Database persistence	26
Update system	29
Vertically dense chart	11
Ad-hock group work	19
Significant improvements in PERT chart	55
Interrupted tasks	31
Consumable resources	9

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1 Introduction
2 Voting rules
3 Getting more votes
4 Candidate Features

Introduction

Who decides what features should be implemented in the next version? Usually GanttProject team leaders do, paying attention to forums and feature tracker. We also had an experience with "big" customer who really wanted to see some features implemented and hired third party developers for implementation of those features. But until now most of GanttProject users couldn't seriously affect the feature selection process. We are going to change this

Voting rules

Every user who contributed some value to GanttProject will be allowed to vote on his favorite features. Voting rules are the following:

One cell you earned is one vote.
When you vote, you allocate some number of cells to some feature. They are not yet charged and you can deallocate them whenever you wish
You can allocate as many cells as you wish but not more than the number of cells you own.
Three features that collect the most of votes (the winner features') will be scheduled for implementation in the next major version of GanttProject (currently it is GanttProject 2.2)
We will charge on cells allocated to voting for the winner features. Cells allocated to features not scheduled for implementation will not be charged and you will be able to spend them on the next voting or on some other things
We will charge on cells allocated to the winner features immediately before we start working on that version
The list of candidate featurs is given below. Every item includes a short description of the problem users are facing with (a user story) and a list of functional requirements for the first version of GP that addresses that problem. If feature becomes the winner, we will implement all not-optional requirements and probably will implement optional ones.

Getting more votes

Learn more how to earn cells

Candidate Features

Resource leveling

We'd like to add a simple resource leveling functionality.

Quick filtering of overallocated resources in resource chart
Ability to select resource to be leveled
Leveling itself which delays or split tasks examining task priorities and slacks

Shared resource database

Everyone of us already has many places where we keep emails and phones of people involved in his projects. LDAP, GMail, other address books... We are not lucky that GanttProject keeps it's own resource database and would love to use some common resource database.

Pluggable infrastructure and UI for importing resource from some data source to GP project
Implementation of plugin supporting some textual data source (like CSV, ICS, vcard, etc.) Not all of these formats but at least those that may be produced by popular address books
and possibly implementation of plugin supporting LDAP data source

Task workload: Impact of resource availability on task duration

We want to distinguish between task workload and task duration. Workload is amount of efforts needed to complete a task, it is measured in human-days (or human-hours). If one human resource is 100% assigned to the task then duration is equal to workload days. However, if resource is 50% assigned, duration becomes twice longer. If two resource are 100% assigned (or one resource is 200% assigned) then duration becomes twice smaller. However, the workload remains the same.

 Relevant feature requests in our tracker:
 http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1642373&group_id=72728&atid=535430

Project-level configuration option (which is set up on creating a new project) which turns on task workload
If task workload is turned on then task properties dialog contains a read/write field "workload" while field "duration" becomes read-only and calculated
Task bars in a gantt chart view correspond to task durations. Possibly task workload or the fact that duration differs from workload is also shown somehow (needs discussion)

Part-time resources

That's simple. We can define weekends, we can define public holidays, we can define days off. But we can't say that "John works on Mondays and Wednesdays, Jane works on Tuesdays and Thursdays".

Ability to select working days (in contrast to days off) in resource properties. Working days can repeat weekly

Project portfolio

We are managing a lot of projects and we want to see an overall picture of their status in a single GanttProject view.

New view which shows a portfolio diagram. It is not absolutely clear what portfolio diagram means but most likely is shows a short summary for each project: the number of resources, tasks, overdue tasks, etc.
Ability to add/remove a project to/from portfolio
Ability to open any project from portfolio diagram (e.g. double clicking it)

Project templates

We create new projects quite often and we always have to change project name, website, calendar, roles, add resources, etc. We'd like to have a templates repository and create new projects by template with a single mouse click

Ability to save some project as template
Ability to open templates repository and create new project from template

Search everywhere

Our project are quite big and sometimes we forget where is our task named "Read documentation" or where is a note containing some text.

Add a search box which would work like Google Desktop search or Mac's Spotlight and would show me all tasks, notes and resources matching a search string

Burn-down chart

We are managing software development projects and usually Gantt charts don't work for us. Those dependencies resemble waterfall development process which is not used in our company. Our process is iterative and it is difficult to predict dependencies between tasks: they appear and disappear and we spend hours updating our charts or do not update them at all. But we know that there are other charts which work better for software development, e.g. burn-down charts from Scrum process.

Think of all tasks as of project backlog
The sum of all task durations is a project workload
Completion percentage multiplied by task duration is work done.
Draw a burn-down chart with a trend predicting the Release Date

Database persistence

We want to be able to save our projects to database, rather than to XML files. XML is nice but our other applications and report generators use databases and don't understand GanttProject's XML

Ability to add JDBC database connection
Ability to create some database schema for storing GP project data (it is ok if this schema is hardcoded, we don't want GP to be so smart to understand our own schema)
Ability to load project from database and to save it back

Update system

GanttProject maintenance releases appear quarterly while usually bugs get fixed earlier, sometimes weeks or even months before release. We want to get bugfixes before they appear in an official release

Add a simple update system that accesses ganttproject.org and downloads necessary updates

Vertically dense chart

Gantt charts are vertically sparse by their nature. If we take a vertical segment of a gantt chart, only small number of tasks will be in bounds of that segment and they are likely to be spread over the whole segment. When there are many tasks and vertical segments are high, we usually see too few tasks in our visible area and we have to scroll up/down to reach other tasks in the segment. However, usually we are working with a segment that corresponds to current day (plus/minus a few days) and we are not happy that we have to scroll so much. We would like to see all tasks from the currently visible vertical segment together. We can achieve such effect reordering tasks in a tree view but it is not the right way to save our time :)

Ability to define a time interval where chart is dense
Tasks in dense interval should be shown one immediately under another, with task/supertask hierarchy where applicable and dependencies
Optionally, tasks in a dense interval may take more vertical space and show all their resources loads under the task bar (or some other relevant information)

Ad-hock group work

We want one project to be edited by several people. At least, we want them to be able to view changes instantly while manager is editing a project. Well, we know that GanttProject can work with WebDAV server but setting it up is a boring task. Usually when we want some kind of parallel work we have no time to bother with WebDAV. But we are inside the single intranet. It would be nice if one of us could press a button and become a server and others could connect to his computer and work with his projects, at least in readonly mode

Ability to turn on server mode
Ability to select projects which would be viewable by clients connecting to a server instance of GP

Significant improvements of PERT chart

We want to be able to print PERT chart and save positions and layout of boxes if we change it

Export PERT chart to PDF/HTML
Printing PERT chart
Persistent layout of PERT chart

 Relevant feature requests in our tracker:
 * http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1724992&group_id=72728&atid=535430
 * http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1639467&group_id=72728&atid=535430

Interrupted tasks

Sometimes we need to interrupt work on task. We want to say something like "this task should be stopped this Tuesday and continued next Monday".

Ability to split a task on some date. One should be able to split a task a few times
Ability to merge split activities
Ability to work with the dates and durations of individual portions as well as with a split task as a whole

 Relevant feature request in our tracker:
 * http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=728980&group_id=72728&atid=535430

 Task splitting in MS Project:
 * http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/project/HA101130751033.aspx

Consumable resources

We want to use material consumable resources, like concrete or bricks and want to assign them to tasks

Ability to introduce custom names and measurement units of consumable resources
Ability to add consumable resources to tasks
Calculation of the sum and, probably, cost of assigned and consumed resources

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