gmane.comp.sysutils.pim.taskcoach

antic_eye | 3 Jun 09:47

Taskcoach for Teamwork

Hi,

first of all: I love the Taskcoach. I'm using it for half a year now
and  it's a fantastic tool. I'm admin and developer in a small
software-engineering company and I'm infecting more and more collegues
with the taskcoach-virus :)

Last week we had a meeting where we discussed how to improve teamwork
on special software-projects and I demonstrated the taskcoach. The
response was positive but there were some problems I like to explain
to you, maybe you want to add some features to taskcoach to make it a
teamplayer.

At first we need a field to track the progress of a task (a simple
percentage). Maybe it's possible to add a feature, that the user can
define a custom field this makes it more flexible.

My idea was, to save the different users task-files on a network
share. So the software manager can view these files. Then I want to
implement a small tool/script, that reads the xml-files and creates
some reports for the manager.

The biggest problem is, that the software manager needs to plan tasks.
F.i. we need the possibility to plan the next week:

* Monday: 3h develop function xy, 2h Document class z, 3h Test class z
...

So we need a possibility to *plan* expenses per day. I don't know how
to do this with taskcoach. Then the software manager needs the ability

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Kramer | 3 Jun 21:02

Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork

See responses inline:

antic_eye wrote:
> first of all: I love the Taskcoach. I'm using it for half a year now
> and  it's a fantastic tool. I'm admin and developer in a small

Amen! I love Taskcoach for what it is and what it does, but more so, I love
Taskcoach because of the POTENTIAL that I see in it! I can see where it's going
and it's a beautiful place. :)

> At first we need a field to track the progress of a task (a simple
> percentage). Maybe it's possible to add a feature, that the user can
> define a custom field this makes it more flexible.

Agreed! This is on my wishlist, too. (I'll post the full list one day)

> My idea was, to save the different users task-files on a network
> share. So the software manager can view these files. Then I want to
> implement a small tool/script, that reads the xml-files and creates
> some reports for the manager.

The problem you're looking to solve - of conflict-free networkable sharing - is
one I'd love to see fixed, too, since the power of TC multiplies exponentially
when people are able to collaborate with it. Your suggested method seems to
address this just fine, and I'm all for it.

> So we need a possibility to *plan* expenses per day. I don't know how
> to do this with taskcoach. Then the software manager needs the ability
> to compare these planned expenses with the actual expenses. I know
> this is maybe not the intention of taskcoach to be a tool for managers

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Jerome Laheurte | 3 Jun 21:28

Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork

On Tue, 3 Jun 2008, Kramer wrote:

>> My idea was, to save the different users task-files on a network
>> share. So the software manager can view these files. Then I want to
>> implement a small tool/script, that reads the xml-files and creates
>> some reports for the manager.
>
> The problem you're looking to solve - of conflict-free networkable sharing - is
> one I'd love to see fixed, too, since the power of TC multiplies exponentially
> when people are able to collaborate with it. Your suggested method seems to
> address this just fine, and I'm all for it.

Network shares (especially SMB) are bad for these kinds of use cases. 
I'm currently working on a feature that would pretty much address the 
issue: SyncML support; if all team members synchronize on the same 
Funambol server, with different client IDs, if the manager only 
creates tasks and the team members only change their assigned tasks, 
it should work just fine.

Still have to work out some technical issues, though. But since it's 
really fun to work on this, I expect to have a fully working prototype 
next week-end. I can already sync tasks and notes with Outlook, though 
I don't use it :)

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Jerome Laheurte | 3 Jun 21:13

Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork

On Tue, 3 Jun 2008, antic_eye wrote:

> At first we need a field to track the progress of a task (a simple
> percentage). Maybe it's possible to add a feature, that the user can
> define a custom field this makes it more flexible.

Percentage done seems to be a standard feature of todo apps, I was 
wondering myself if it was worth it adding it to Taskcoach. Frank, 
what do you think ?

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Frank Niessink | 3 Jun 22:49

Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork

Hi all,

2008/6/3 Jerome Laheurte <fraca7@...>:
> On Tue, 3 Jun 2008, antic_eye wrote:
>
>> At first we need a field to track the progress of a task (a simple
>> percentage). Maybe it's possible to add a feature, that the user can
>> define a custom field this makes it more flexible.
>
> Percentage done seems to be a standard feature of todo apps, I was
> wondering myself if it was worth it adding it to Taskcoach. Frank,
> what do you think ?

Shouldn't be too hard too add a '%complete' field as long as it's just
a field entered by the user. However, subtasks make it slightly more
difficult: for a task A that's 50% completed with a subtask A1 that is
25% completed and another subtask A2 that is 100% completed what is
the 'overall completeness' of the task? How do we weigh the different
percentages? Based on budget? Time spent?

Suppose A has 4 hours spent on it, A1 10 and A2 10, than we can expect
to spent another 4 hours on A, 30 on A1, 0 on A2 so overall
completeness is 24/(24+34) = 41%. Makes sense?

But if the user doesn't specify budget nor tracks time we're doomed. I
guess we'll just have to weigh all tasks equally in that case.

Also, would the %complete need to be updated automatically if a task
has a budget and time is tracked? E.g. if you have spent 5 hours on a
10 hour task, would the %complete be 50%?

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Jerome Laheurte | 4 Jun 06:58

Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork

On Tue, 3 Jun 2008, Frank Niessink wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> 2008/6/3 Jerome Laheurte <fraca7@...>:
>> On Tue, 3 Jun 2008, antic_eye wrote:
>>
>>> At first we need a field to track the progress of a task (a simple
>>> percentage). Maybe it's possible to add a feature, that the user can
>>> define a custom field this makes it more flexible.
>>
>> Percentage done seems to be a standard feature of todo apps, I was
>> wondering myself if it was worth it adding it to Taskcoach. Frank,
>> what do you think ?
>
> Shouldn't be too hard too add a '%complete' field as long as it's just
> a field entered by the user. However, subtasks make it slightly more
> difficult: for a task A that's 50% completed with a subtask A1 that is
> 25% completed and another subtask A2 that is 100% completed what is
> the 'overall completeness' of the task? How do we weigh the different
> percentages? Based on budget? Time spent?
>
> Suppose A has 4 hours spent on it, A1 10 and A2 10, than we can expect
> to spent another 4 hours on A, 30 on A1, 0 on A2 so overall
> completeness is 24/(24+34) = 41%. Makes sense?
>
> But if the user doesn't specify budget nor tracks time we're doomed. I
> guess we'll just have to weigh all tasks equally in that case.
>
> Also, would the %complete need to be updated automatically if a task

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Kramer | 4 Jun 19:51

Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork

Jerome Laheurte wrote:
> No, I don't think completion has much to do with time spent actually. 
> The last 10% may take much more/less than 1/9 of the time already 
> spent... I think this value should be read-only for parent tasks and 
> simply weighted by priority (or priority+1 since the default is 0).

I was also wondering if "time spent" should really be hard-linked to "progress",
and in the end, my conclusion was that it should be. While you bring up a valid
point about the last 10% taking 50% of the time (this is frequently the case in
many lines of work), I don't think this is a distinction most of us care about
in general.

Example: When we ask a mechanic "how close are you to completion on my car?" and
he says "It's 90% complete," we expect him to spend another 10% of the time
finishing. If he spent 3 hours getting to 90% and then another 3 hours getting
to 100%, we would be disappointed and frustrated. It always comes back to time,
the most precious of commodities.

(IMHO)

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Jerome Laheurte | 4 Jun 20:23

Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork

On Wed, 4 Jun 2008, Kramer wrote:

> Jerome Laheurte wrote:
>> No, I don't think completion has much to do with time spent actually.
>> The last 10% may take much more/less than 1/9 of the time already
>> spent... I think this value should be read-only for parent tasks and
>> simply weighted by priority (or priority+1 since the default is 0).
>
> I was also wondering if "time spent" should really be hard-linked to "progress",
> and in the end, my conclusion was that it should be. While you bring up a valid
> point about the last 10% taking 50% of the time (this is frequently the case in
> many lines of work), I don't think this is a distinction most of us care about
> in general.
>
> Example: When we ask a mechanic "how close are you to completion on my car?" and
> he says "It's 90% complete," we expect him to spend another 10% of the time
> finishing. If he spent 3 hours getting to 90% and then another 3 hours getting
> to 100%, we would be disappointed and frustrated. It always comes back to time,
> the most precious of commodities.

You've got a point. Then %done for leaf tasks would be time spent / 
budget and then parent tasks would have total children time spent / 
total children budget, leaving out subtasks with no budget with a 0% 
done / 100% done (when completed). What do you think, Frank ? The 
discussion is rather academic for me since I don't use budgets (I 
consider I can't know how much time a task would take until I 
complete it), and rarely efforts. But I thought it would 
be a nice feature for most people, and in my recent review of 
web-based task managers, it appeared to me as a pretty standard 
feature.

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Carl Zmola | 5 Jun 03:51

Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork


 Jerome Laheurte wrote:

> On Wed, 4 Jun 2008, Kramer wrote:
>
> > Example: When we ask a mechanic "how close are you to completion on 
> my car?" and
> > he says "It's 90% complete," we expect him to spend another 10% of 
> the time
> > finishing. If he spent 3 hours getting to 90% and then another 3 
> hours getting
> > to 100%, we would be disappointed and frustrated. It always comes 
> back to time,
> > the most precious of commodities.
>
> You've got a point. Then %done for leaf tasks would be time spent /
> budget and then parent tasks would have total children time spent /
> total children budget, leaving out subtasks with no budget with a 0%
> done / 100% done (when completed). What do you think, Frank ? The
> discussion is rather academic for me since I don't use budgets (I
> consider I can't know how much time a task would take until I
> complete it), and rarely efforts. But I thought it would
> be a nice feature for most people, and in my recent review of
> web-based task managers, it appeared to me as a pretty standard
> feature.

The only gotcha here is that if you go over 100% on a budgeted task, you 
should not be adding to your projects's completion.

Parent completion percentage = Sum ( min(time spent on task,budgeted

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Jerome Laheurte | 5 Jun 08:58

Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork

On Wed, 4 Jun 2008, Carl Zmola wrote:

> The only problem is getting good estimates in the first place 

And that would be the user's problem, not TC's :)

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Alejandro Celery | 4 Jun 22:24

Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork

Hi, I´m Alex (first post).
My take on the complete % for subtasks is quite simple: Let the user decide and input how much of the overall task does each subtask represent. For example, you could say that Subtask A is 64% of the father task, Subtask B is 20% and subtask C is 16%. So, when you say subtask A is at 44%, the overall completion would be 0.44 * 0.64 * 100. Of course assuming that everything is linear, maybe it´s too simplistic. But at least that´s the way i´d like to use it.
About time spent, i think it is completely independent from completeness %. It happens for example with tasks like "Find out HTF to get redmine up and running!!!" (took me quite some time). You never know how much.
Hope it helped!

Regards,
Alex

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Matt Wilkie | 5 Jun 21:55

Re: Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork

Interesting discussion on how to measure progress. I'd like to bring
in an alternate idea, I don't know if/how it might map to how
TaskCoach does things though. It's called Evidence Based Scheduling.
In a nutshell: for every task record an estimate at the beginning how
long you think it will take, then time how long it actually takes and
record that. Keep both numbers. Over time a database will be built up
of real vs imagined (interestingly the gap remains relatively
consistent), use that ratio to calculate future time estimates. Here
is an extended description of the concept:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html

cheers,

--matt

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Kramer | 5 Jun 21:55

Re: Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork

Matt Wilkie wrote:
> TaskCoach does things though. It's called Evidence Based Scheduling.

Such a tool would be of incredible use to me, especially if built into TC.

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Frank Niessink | 5 Jun 22:50

Re: Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork

Hi Matt,

2008/6/5 Matt Wilkie <maphew@...>:
> Interesting discussion on how to measure progress. I'd like to bring
> in an alternate idea, I don't know if/how it might map to how
> TaskCoach does things though. It's called Evidence Based Scheduling.
> In a nutshell: for every task record an estimate at the beginning how
> long you think it will take, then time how long it actually takes and
> record that. Keep both numbers. Over time a database will be built up
> of real vs imagined (interestingly the gap remains relatively
> consistent), use that ratio to calculate future time estimates. Here
> is an extended description of the concept:
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html

Interesting. If you use 'budget' to record your estimates and you
track time then all the raw data is already there and TC would just
need to calculate the velocity. Of course, each completed leaf task
would have its own velocity (estimated 10 hrs, really used 9 hrs,
velocity = 0.9) and composite tasks would have an overall velocity
that takes all (completed) subtasks into account as well. Then TC
would be able to calculate a estimation for the remaining work based
on the velocity of already completed work and the remaining budget.

We could even combine this with the %complete: a task that has a
budget of 10 hours, has 2 hours spent on it and is 25% complete would
have a velocity of 0.8. Using it this way makes it not feasible to
base the %complete on the time spent though.

Cheers, Frank

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Matt Wilkie | 5 Jun 23:15

Re: Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork

> We could even combine this with the %complete: a task that has a
> budget of 10 hours, has 2 hours spent on it and is 25% complete would
> have a velocity of 0.8. Using it this way makes it not feasible to
> base the %complete on the time spent though.

For the me the comparison of hours used vs hours budgeted for is a
more useful set of numbers than percentages anyway. Others may
disagree of course. :)

-- 
-matt

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Frank Niessink | 5 Jun 23:31

Re: Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork

2008/6/5 Matt Wilkie <maphew@...>:
>> We could even combine this with the %complete: a task that has a
>> budget of 10 hours, has 2 hours spent on it and is 25% complete would
>> have a velocity of 0.8. Using it this way makes it not feasible to
>> base the %complete on the time spent though.
>
> For the me the comparison of hours used vs hours budgeted for is a
> more useful set of numbers than percentages anyway. Others may
> disagree of course. :)

Hey, I just realized:
- If the task is not completed hours spent/hours budgeted is an
estimation of %complete
- If the task is completed hours spent/hours budgeted is (an
estimation of) the velocity
- TC can use a known velocity to correct the estimation of %complete

Suppose you have:
- Parent: budgeted 10, spent 3, not completed
- Child1: budgeted 10, spent 6, not completed
- Child2: budgeted 10, spent 9, completed

Now we can use these figures as follows:
- Velocity of child2 is 0.9 (9 hours spent/10 hours budgeted).
- Child1 velocity is unknown because it is not completed
- Child2 %complete is 66% based on 6/(0.9*10), expected time still
needed 3 hours
- Parent itself %completed is 33% based on 3/(0.9*10), expected time
still needed 6 hours
- Overall %complete is 9+6+3/(0.9*10+0.9*10+0.9*10) = 18/27 = 66%

How about that?

Cheers, Frank

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Jerome Laheurte | 6 Jun 09:30

Re: Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork

On Thu, 5 Jun 2008, Frank Niessink wrote:

> Suppose you have:
> - Parent: budgeted 10, spent 3, not completed
> - Child1: budgeted 10, spent 6, not completed
> - Child2: budgeted 10, spent 9, completed
>
> Now we can use these figures as follows:
> - Velocity of child2 is 0.9 (9 hours spent/10 hours budgeted).
> - Child1 velocity is unknown because it is not completed
> - Child2 %complete is 66% based on 6/(0.9*10), expected time still
> needed 3 hours
> - Parent itself %completed is 33% based on 3/(0.9*10), expected time
> still needed 6 hours
> - Overall %complete is 9+6+3/(0.9*10+0.9*10+0.9*10) = 18/27 = 66%
>
> How about that?

Seems nice, but the documentation *must* include a description of this 
or users will flood the mailing list asking HTF the % is computed :)

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Matt Wilkie | 10 Jun 22:31

Re: Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork

> Now we can use these figures as follows:
> - Velocity of child2 is 0.9 (9 hours spent/10 hours budgeted).
> - Child1 velocity is unknown because it is not completed
> - Child2 %complete is 66% based on 6/(0.9*10), expected time still
> needed 3 hours
> - Parent itself %completed is 33% based on 3/(0.9*10), expected time
> still needed 6 hours
> - Overall %complete is 9+6+3/(0.9*10+0.9*10+0.9*10) = 18/27 = 66%
>
> How about that?

I don't have a quibble with it. Let's try it and find out :)

-- 
-matt

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stefank60 | 6 Oct 15:33

Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork

--- In taskcoach@..., "Matt Wilkie" <maphew@...> wrote:
>
> > We could even combine this with the %complete: a task that has a
> > budget of 10 hours, has 2 hours spent on it and is 25% complete 
would
> > have a velocity of 0.8. Using it this way makes it not feasible to
> > base the %complete on the time spent though.
> 
> For the me the comparison of hours used vs hours budgeted for is a
> more useful set of numbers than percentages anyway. Others may
> disagree of course. :)
> 
> -- 
> -matt
>

I would find both useful but do agree with your statement above 

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stefank60 | 6 Oct 15:30

Re: Taskcoach for Teamwork

--- In taskcoach@..., "Matt Wilkie" <maphew@...> wrote:
>
> Interesting discussion on how to measure progress. I'd like to bring
> in an alternate idea, I don't know if/how it might map to how
> TaskCoach does things though. It's called Evidence Based Scheduling.
> In a nutshell: for every task record an estimate at the beginning 
how
> long you think it will take, then time how long it actually takes 
and
> record that. Keep both numbers. Over time a database will be built 
up
> of real vs imagined (interestingly the gap remains relatively
> consistent), use that ratio to calculate future time estimates. Here
> is an extended description of the concept:
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html
> 
> cheers,
> 
> --matt
>

Yep I like your thinking here - it's a good way of improving one's 
estimates of how long a task is likely to take.

thanks for that link - looks interesting will have a read

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