Category: AI, Computation, and Technology

OVERSING BETA RELEASE?

We are seeking a few (very few) additional beta sites. The minimum organization that we can afford to pay attention to is probably in the vicinity of 40-50 people. This is simply because it takes the same effort to support 40, or 100, as it does to support 5.

So if you know anyone who wants to try it – especially in contrast to using Jira, we’d be interested in talking to them.

OVERSING UPDATE

1) In February, we started full time effort on the Reporting Panel. The primary view uses “blocks” that you double-click on in order to drill down into them. The other view takes advantage of the horizontal workspace to show time periods. So the reporting view is a bit of a data explorer. Except that it’s not in a tree view as we usually see. There are a lot of reports that we need to make for financial purposes, but the panel provides all the basic data Q&A that users will want to see.

2) I’m about a third of the way through the first draft of the documentation. It’s in three parts: the ‘What’, which covers the basics. The “How” which uses of tutorial structure “how do to x”. The the Advanced section, which tells you how to apply it to your organization. I only need the first for beta. I expect to work through the second shortly. And the third will be something I incrementally fill out over the coming months.

3) The web site is far enough along that while it’s missing the videos, we can finish the presentations (sliders) this month, and simplify the message a bit.

OUTSTANDING ISSUES

While we certainly can release the beta this month (March), we still have these open issues:

0) Finish Reports (I can’t estimate this at all, but reports are a never-ending feature so it doesn’t matter.)

1) Permissions on Workflows (I just discovered this issue) (I suspect this will take a week to ten days?)

2) Drag and Drop to move to Schedule State / Right Click to Schedule State (long standing issue. Always seems to get moved to lower priority. But it’s necessary.) We had quite a bit of debate over this because we don’t want the schedule state to be invasive or to add complexity since it isn’t necessary. So we decided on a compromise, and that is that we separate out the scheduling features into their own ‘block’ on the Tasks panel, and we don’t integrate the scheduling sub-phase into the Main Sequence: Backlog, To-Do(Active), Done.

3) Display Appointments on the Gantt Chart. (long standing issue) (It’s hard to know what resourcing needs your attention without this feature. We are saving this for last because we find working with this bit of source code time consuming.)

4) Cascading changes to the schedule when we delete dependencies are still not working correctly. I am not sure why this remains an issue.

5) Add the accounting,payroll,operational period properties and functions. This is technically the ‘last feature’, because all it does is allow you to configure the lifecycle of when you allow submissions of different financial activity, and when you post and close it. I have no estimate on this but I suspect it’s a three week effort at the outside. I’m worried that the number of transaction touch points is high, and that it’s hard to test, so that is why despite being fairly simple (creating events), I am cautious about time.

6) Minor Fixes to Forecasting and Responsibilities. (forecasts should be outer-joined on operational periods, so that we know what’s there and what’s missing) (responsibilities are your ‘inbox’ for workflow activity. and we need some minor tweaks to the table view.) Note: In the future, this panel will switch between email and responsibilities when we add email integration.)

7) Still missing ability to select for organizations and display Program Statistics in the Tasks Panel. All tasks roll up to parent tasks. And yes, we flatten the data so that we aren’t querying hierarchies all the time. That means that we can show just the Program, project, or deliverable ‘rows’ and that they will reflect the data underneath them without requiring that we display all rows. So, in the tasks view you can easily see a worldwide operation’s active programs and report on them without having to expose the detail of each program.

MINOR Pre-Release Work (While In Beta)

1) Integrating links to help into application.

2) Clean Build of DB/App – Builds and Instances ready to Launch.

3) Sample Workflows, org structures, projects.

4) Update languages: We should launch with:

– English

– Russian

– German

– Spanish

– French

– Italian

Although I suspect that the translations will need a LOT of editing.

SUBSTANTIVE WORK DURING BETA PHASE

1) Federation.

2) CSS / Less / Javascript optimization (this makes me crazy)

3) Finish updating via Websockets outside of Workspace Panels. (I am not even sure it matters outside of the workspace honestly, but I feel that for The user, consistency matters.) There are some current places where it isn’t right. And it still seems like the browser fails to detect that the server is not sending messages to its current context now and then.

Curt Doolittle