Recent Posts by bradphelan

Topic: feature ideas & requests / UI suggestion

Hi there LPers,

Just a suggestion. I think the indentation for items is too aggressive. There is about 1cm of whitespace then a pretty dot icon and then the text for the items starts about 1.5 to 2cm in from the enclosing scope. Given that I ( and many others ) like to have verbose item descriptions this seems like wasted space especially when the text of item is cut off to the right.

With regards to item text being cut off to the right it would be nice that when the item hovered over by the mouse the entire text is shown. This is extremely important in “Priority tasklist” mode when you need to see the “Project folder” breadcrumb.

Cheers

Brad

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Done and confirmed

The new feature coming is that you’ll be able to set a “watch” on any container or item even if you don’t own it and get notified. You’ll want to “watch” Task Reviews so that you get notified when people drop stuff into it.

Now I just logged onto the forum to request this very feature as it was bugging me that I don’t get notified of comment threads because I don’t own the task. Is it possible to automatically register a person if they make a comment on a feature. This is a common usecase and it would avoid the problem that a user comments on a task that they do not own and then do not get notification that an answer or counter comment has been made.

Regards

B

Topic: help topics / Scheduling meetings with LP

With the new FLOW around feature in I thought i’d try to schedule a meeting with LP. However it did not work as I’d expected. I created a container called “meeting” in the project view. I set the delay until and promise by date for the meeting container to the day of the meeting. I then added in the participants to the meeting as sub-tasks and set the estimate to 0.1 – 0.1 days worth of work.

This did not work correctly. The first two participants were scheduled correctly. However the third participant got delayed by one week. The interesting thing is that the meeting container is the highest priority project. I assumed that when the meeting became ready (unblocked) it’s tasks would get scheduled immediately and any other tasks previously flowed in to fill the slack spaced would get delayed.

Any ideas.

Regards

Brad

Topic: faq / Can I convert a task to a project?

Hi Melinda,

I think you are a bit ahead of yourself there. I was very excited to see this post and rushed to my account to try it out but alas it does not seem to be live yet. Are you planning a new release this week?

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Download and Local Install version

What about the option of deploying LP over Amazon EC2 and giving customers the (higher priced) option of having a dedicated server. You guys still control it but the performance can be quickly upgraded depending on the size of the customer.

Topic: help topics / Dependency Status

I read the last sentence I posted and it hardly seems like english :) I’ll try again.

In general the solution is to raise the priority of a task that has dependents to the priority of the highest priority task in it’s chain of dependents.

I think that sounds better.

Topic: help topics / Dependency Status

Hi Charles, Good to see that flow around will be implemented. One note on this feature that might bite in the future. I suggested this feature to Melinda in a separate email. Flow around is essentially the behaviour that occurs in thread scheduling. There is always something ready to run even when high priority tasks become blocked. However there is one subtle error that can occur in implementing such a scheduler. Because you will still have a global priority queue as defined by the top to bottom ordering in the project you can engineer a problem called priority inversion. The problem can be outlined as below.

Three tasks in priority order highest at the top, lowest at the bottom.

Task A depends on C
Task B
Task C

High priority task A cannot start until low priority task C is complete so it becomes blocked and the the medium priority task B will run. This scenario is however wrong because B has a lower priority than A and A does not have a dependency on B. B should never be scheduled before A. The solution to let C be scheduled first so that it can be completed and then let A be scheduled.

In general the solution raise the priority of task that has dependents to priority of the highest priority task in it’s the upward chain of dependents. This way you can preserve the general case that the priority ordering of tasks can be implicitly viewed as a dependency chain on viewed otherwise when explicit dependencies are put in. Without handling priority inversion you may find users adding in more explicit dependencies to force the schedule back into correct shape.

Regards

Brad

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Resource/Capacity Planning

Any chance of an API to all this data with a nice Ruby library to consume it with?

B

Topic: help topics / Baking in time for support

I tried a little experiment. We have five sprints schedules. I break a sprint down like this

• ITEMS
• release

In capitals are projects and lowers are tasks. I have made release depend on items and as project manager I am responsible for it. However I have no items scheduled for this sprint and can work on items scheduled for later sprints. Each sprint is modelled identically. However LP generates an unexpected schedule. I now have two weeks before the release task for the current task is scheduled to start as it is blocked on completion of all tasks in items. Two weeks of slack time not scheduled to do anything. However I have plenty to do scheduled for later sprints that have no dependencies. Why doesn’t LP fill the slack time which I have available now with later work?

I understand that the project view is a priority queue. However when a high priority task is blocked on a dependency lower priority tasks should be scheduled in until the higher priority task is unblocked. When the higher priority task becomes unblocked the system needs to reschedule. This should be modeled in the schedule view as the low priority task being worked upon and then stopped and the high priority task being picked up. Once the high priority task is finished the low priority task can be picked up again.

It is just like real time thread scheduling. When a high priority thread is blocked on IO lower priority threads have a chance to run.

Currently LP gives me a very bad expected completion time for my current project modelling because of all the unfilled slack time.

I can solve the problem by moving my later scheduled items into the earlier sprint but that would be conceptually wrong as they are not really required as a delivery in that sprint and if they are not completed then I hold up delivery of that sprint unnecessarily.

Regards

Brad

Topic: help topics / Baking in time for support

Hi LP,

I’ve broken up my project into small sprints each of which culminate in a release to the customer. However from experience I know that there will be a certain amount of time supporting the customer on each release. What I don’t know is what form each support request will take, be that a bug report or some tutoring or something else. Until such requests come in my team should work on items in the next sprint.

What I’d like to do is plan in up front 1 week of support to a particular release. When I get support requests against that release I would then like to bill the time against that block of pre allocated time.

When I am satisfied that no more requests are coming in against this release I can close the block of time. If my estimate has been good then the sum of the work of all items billed against this block will equal the estimate of the block itself. If I have over estimated when I close the block my schedule will shrink, if I have underestimated my schedule will grow.

I am not sure the nicest way to model this.

Can you give any advice here.

Regards

Brad

Topic: announcements / New features! Bulk add, improved performance, more

Nice new features. Bulk add really speeds up time. A couple of quick notes

• Add sample. Nice feature but where can I add my own samples? I’d like to create a template for a release cycle or sprint or whatever you call it and be able to drop a new one in using the add sample feature. I have found the duplicate project action but it is not quite as nice as registering a series of templates.

• Duplicate is nice but it would be better with copy/cut/paste semantics so I could copy an item and then paste it somewhere else without using the drag drop which is somewhat difficult when you need to cross more you leave the border of the tree and force the tree to scroll.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Printing Reports

It would be nice, for each report configuration to be able to specify an email distribution list. The reports can be generated automatically and be delivered on a configurable periodic basis. The email address should not have to be associated with an LP account. This way I can send out reports daily or weekly to those who need/want to know but don’t need/want to learn the interface to LP.

Regards

Brad

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Tab key in text fields and indenting

These comments refer only to the plain text area fields in LP not the rich visual editors:

I find it really annoying in large text fields on web forms especially when I am trying to write a semi structured document that tabbing and indenting do not work.

First of all the tab key jump to the next form field which is counter intuitive when editing a document.

Second it is really hard to write an indented paragraph like

The quick
brown fox jumped
over the lazy dog.

I have to hit the space key four times on each line to do the above. I am sure that some fancy JavaScript could solve this problem.

(1) The tab key should work as in an editor, perhapps only after the user has entered at least one character of text so that by default it works as normal in a web page for jumping between elements

(2) If I hit return on an indented line then the next line should be indented as per the previous line.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Download and Local Install version

Melinda: We don’t, however, have any estimate (yet) of when this will be available.

Surely you are using LP have an estimate in your plan for this item even if it 0 to 5 years :)

Topic: project management / Managing small projects during one large project

I think the current system of filters gives you exactly what you need. If I want to see the temporal view for only one category I can do that using the filter. However as the number of categories rises the drop down filter may becomes a little unwieldy and a way to pin the dropdown and scroll and select your way through it would help.

The two views are orthogonal and I think it would be a mistake to leak ordering from one to the other.

Topic: project management / Managing small projects during one large project

Charles is correct in pointing out the categories view. However I think they have the naming a little confusing and I made the same mistake as you the first time I tried to set up a project. The project view should really be called a priority or timeline view whereas the category view should be called either the project/requirements view. However naming aside, in the project view you should break you line items into groups based on priority or when then should be delivered. ie

Month 1 Sprint
- wk 1 items
- wk 2 items
- wk 3 items
- wk 4 items
Months 2 Sprint
- wk 5 items
- wk 6 items
- wk 7 items
- wk 8 items
...

In your categories view you break down your project(s) functionally

• Customer A Project
  - Planning Activities
  - Specification – Widget A – Widget B
• Customer B Project
  - Planning Activities
  - Specification – Widget C – Widget D
• Customer C Project
  - Planning Activities
  - Specification – Widget E – Widget F

Now any line items in your category view can be assigned to any priority slot in your projects view.

Again I think the term “Projects View” misleads people at first in trying to organize things according to functional grouping instead of priority. However once you “get it” it is very nice to work with.

Regards

Brad

Topic: help topics / How to clear an alert

I have an alert that says the estimate was made by another person. How do I clear the alert? I don’t want to change the estimate and there is no accept button I can see.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Fast task entry

Instead of clicking add task, save, add task, save, add task, save …. which takes ages to enter a significant number of tasks would it be possible to batch enter tasks.

A user interface where there is a multi line text field. Each line excluding blank lines becomes a new subtask of the current project. There should be buttons specifying the category and project. Perhaps even the estimates could be
specified.

Example:
—
buttonUpFcn, 1 – 2
buttonDownFcn, 3 – 4
errorHandler, 3 – 5
testing, 7 – 8
—

would create 4 tasks. I guess it is similar to the import CSV function but you enter the information in a text field instead of loading an external file.

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Changing an Entity's Type

Vote +1 for this feature.

I have allready several times today had to delete a work item and then a container in it’s place. My suggestion for fast UI on this problem is to select break task and then be presented with an edit box. You type a name on each line, as many as you like, click a button and the new tasks are created with the original estimates distributed evenly across the new tasks. You can then go and edit the new tasks to fix up the estimates.

Brad

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Date localisation

Europeans and Australian like to have their dates written

day / month / year

whilst Americans like

month / day / year

Being an Aussie I find my brain twisted when trying to parse the American date format especially when the day is 12 or below.

Is there any way to localize the date?

Regards

Brad

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Idea for dependencies

Ok I see I am working slightly orthogonal to the LiquidPlanner way. I should be grouping my functional behaviour by categories. Projects are time based ordering. AND I just figured out I can do nested categories. VERY NICE. I’ll reorder my project and be on my way. That kind of removes my requirement in my top post.

Brad

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Idea for dependencies

Nothing I hate more than the tangled web of dependency linked lines in MS Project and the like. I think that there is a nicer way to model this in the Gant Chart.

For a task that has dependencies create a virtual project that contains all preceding tasks. Essentially soft links to the real tasks. When the little “dependents” icon is clicked it could unroll this virtual project showing all the associated tasks/project in proximity to the real one.

This would make writing milestones easier. I like to order all my features in a hierarchical structure but then want to view them grouped by milestone. The milestones behave like virtual projects with some color coding or icon to suggest that this is only a soft link.

Cheers

Brad

PS: I just convinced my team to use the tool :)

Topic: feature ideas & requests / Batch Edit

The possibility to select multiple tasks and reassign them or change their category. It would mitigate some of the slow page load time problems.

Topic: troubleshooting / Slow page loads

I am in Austria, Europe and I find that it takes about 4s to load a page. I do not have the firebug plugin.

Any ideas. The tool is super and I would like to use it but it is a bit slow at the moment.