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How are duration and assignee supposed to affect scheduling?

Added by Brad Smith over 10 years ago

The way Redmine shows issues in the Gantt and Calendar views is confusing to me, and I'm not sure if it's an issue with Redmine or if I'm just approaching this wrong. For example:

  • The length of a task, and thus the scheduling of tasks that "follow" it, seems to be based only on start/due date, not estimated duration. If I create a task with an estimated time of 100 hours but don't set an explicit due date, it shows up as one day in length. Isn't the whole point that I should be able to tell redmine the estimated durations of and relationships between my tasks, and then have it figure out when each task needs to start/end to stick to that schedule?
  • Is Redmine supposed to take assignee into account when scheduling tasks? For example, if I have two 6 hour tasks, I would expect them to be treated as do-able in a single day if the tasks have different assignees, but not if they are both assigned to the same person. This could just be more confusion for me stemming from the first issue, though.

So, am I just missing something here? Redmine is looking very close to something that could help me immensely, but I really need to resolve issues like this before I can make use of it, let alone start evangelizing it.

Thanks to anyone who can help!


Replies (4)

RE: How are duration and assignee supposed to affect scheduling? - Added by Brad Smith over 10 years ago

Potentially relevant: I've tried using the "better gantt chart" plugin, which talks about rescheduling tasks, but still seems to be based on explicit due dates rather than durations, from what I can tell...

RE: How are duration and assignee supposed to affect scheduling? - Added by Brad Smith over 10 years ago

Looks like Redmine just doesn't do this (scheduling by duration rather than due date) even though people have been asking for it for years [[http://www.redmine.org/issues/1953]] :(

I know it's all volunteer driven, so I can't blame the devs for not getting around to it yet, but to me this seems like a major deficiency. Does everyone else just use explicit due dates for everything? Or just use Redmine for issue tracking as opposed to project planning? I notice that none of the "sites that use redmine" linked from the Wiki seem to use Gantt or Calendar views, including Redmine's own site, which is perhaps telling.

RE: How are duration and assignee supposed to affect scheduling? - Added by Brad Smith over 10 years ago

To rephrase my original question in light of this, what do people use the Estimated Time field for? It seems that it affects neither the duration, nor the % complete of the task, so... what's it for? Just comparing how much time was spent to how much you expected it to take? (not that that's not useful)

RE: How are duration and assignee supposed to affect scheduling? - Added by Jan Niggemann (redmine.org team member) over 10 years ago

At $dayjob we use it to compare the estimated time and the real time taken in order to refine or estimates (where necessary).

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