Can't handle collaborative working

[Robert Inder]

When the system calculates start dates from estimated hours and finish dates, there is no way to cope with the possibility of more than one person working no it.

That's a serious limitation for general project planning.

Particularly given that the chart seems to always calculate its own start date even if there is one on the ticket. (#9534)

[falkb]

What do you exactly mean with "more than one person working on it"? Do you mean working on it one after another in the planned ticket lifetime? Or do you mean working on it at the same time?

[Robert Inder]

At the same time.

The problem isn't obvious if you are thinking in terms of fault tickets or similar.

But I'm wanting to use Trac as a project management tool. Some of the tasks may well be big enough to have more than one person allocated to them. But I can't tell Trac that, so it won't be able to calculate start dates sensibly. Unless there is a way to add a "number of people" field to the ticket...

[Chris Nelson]

Replying to robert@interactive.co.uk:

.. But I'm wanting to use Trac as a project management tool.

That's my goal.

Some of the tasks may well be big enough to have more than one person allocated to them. But I can't tell Trac that, so it won't be able to calculate start dates sensibly. Unless there is a way to add a "number of people" field to the ticket...

Ultimately, I'd like an "%effort" field. You could have two people on the task by setting it to 200%. Or one person working half time by setting it to 50%, etc.

[Robert Inder]

Replying to ChrisNelson:

Ultimately, I'd like an "%effort" field. You could have two people on the task by setting it to 200%. Or one person working half time by setting it to 50%, etc.

Yes, that's the kind of think I think is needed.

Thought I think you should look for a better name than "%effort".

That name sounds very like a person splitting their time, and "200% of a person" is not an obvious way to think of 2 people.

Maybe "Commitment"? Or "Committed Effort", or something like that.

Robert.

[Mitchell.Dennison@…]

I have added in my own patch to my copy that has included a field called "Owner Allocation". It is a value between .01 and 1.0, and it's used to dictate the percentage of time that a user takes on projects. With this value, I change the work_hours function to adjust the total number of hours by adding more hours with this percentage. This means that an 8 hour ticket at .5 is really 16 hours. This means that the chart displays the task as taking 2 days instead of 1. It was a pretty simple fix, and added LOTS of support for tickets.

I believe that this covers what Robert is looking for, but I cannot be sure. Cheers!

[Mitchell.Dennison@…]

In response to my previous comment, here are the pseudo-steps I followed:

1. Within trac.ini, I added under [trac-custom] the field that I wanted to add

2. Within trac.py, I created the appropriate get/set commands to query the DB for that information and to set environment variables equal to that information.

3. Also within trac.py, I changed the workHours function to factor in the values that I just set and to edit the total required hours per that.

Hopefully that helps some.