An introduction

This is a semi-public place to dump text too flimsy to even become a blog post. I wouldn't recommend reading it unless you have a lot of time to waste. You'd be better off at my livejournal. I also have another blog, and write most of the French journal summaries at the Eurozine Review.

Why do I clutter up the internet with this stuff at all? Mainly because I'm trying to get into the habit of displaying as much as possible of what I'm doing in public. Also, Blogger is a decent interface for a notebook

Thursday, July 8, 2010

GANTT

Embedded in a project that's floundering a little as it expands beyond the size that the devs can keep in their heads. So, looking for some relatively lightweight, way of visualizing the moving parts and the work that needs to be done. And, as every other time I've looked in this area, finding most solutions to be too feature-light, too complicated, or sometimes both.



First are the project scheduling systems. Whatever they focus on, it's hard to think of them except as tools for generating GANTT charts. I can imagine these being useful for, say, a big construction project with complex interdependencies of people and machines. For coding, not so much. Particularly not Taskjuggler, which seems to delight in being non-user-friendly. That is , it is is complicated and does a bad job of explaining itself -- but then tries to use this as evidence of how sophisticated it is. I ran away before finding out; complexity is not what I want!



Gnome planner is quite possibly much inferior for large projects, but at least lets me add a task without hours grepping through the docs. If I ever need a gantt chart, I'll certainly head there rather than taskjuggler. I honestly believe that coding extra features into planner as required would be easier than making sense of taskjuggler



So, I think I'll do without!


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