Re: Completion should be effort invested instead of percentage of duration

[Kurt Maute <kurt maute us>]

On Wed, 2007-01-17 at 20:03 +0100, Maurice van der Pot wrote:
> Hi guys,

Hi Maurice

I think we need to answer this question first, or my brain gets all
twisted around:

> P.S.: Which is better, 'work done' or 'effort spent'?

I think you're talking about 'effort spent' - right?  
Because to me - 'work done' is another way of saying %complete

> I have come to the conclusion that most of the flexibility I mentioned
> before is not useful and I suggest the following compromise.
> 
> We allow people to select if they express progress for a task in a
> percentage or in work done. The task dialog will get two fields, one for
> percentage complete and one for work done. At any time only one is
> editable and the other is greyed out, depending on which one they use to
> express progress. The one that is greyed out will always be recalculated
> if the other or the total work for a task is modified.

So if you're talking about effort spent, it doesn't translate to %
complete, and you'd have to keep both fields since you can't tell how
much of work was accomplished by the amount of time spent.

> Compared to full flexibility, this has one limitation:
>   It is not possible to have total work recalculated if progress is
>   changed. This shouldn't be a problem because you can still update
>   work done first and then drag the duration until the percentage is
>   correct (or vice versa if progress is expressed in percentage).

If you have %complete and effort spent, you could recalculate total
work, right?  This should be an option, of course, since not everyone
will want their schedule to change with every entry they make (an also
due to the fact that some tasks may be expected to make a slow (or fast)
start).

> - libplanner should probably be switched over to tracking progress in
>   work done (as in my patch) and %complete could be purely a UI thing

I think we should leave %complete as the tracking field, unless there's
some value added in changing it.


-- 
Kurt Maute <kurt maute us>