It’s been a few weeks since the last update – an aggressive travel schedule interrupted writing – but we haven’t been stationary.
Since the last web2project update, we’ve had another handful of bugs submitted. Some were trivial and were closed in a matter of minutes. Others were complicated and we fought with them for hours. Either way, all but one were easily demonstrated in a number of different ways, shapes and forms…
And that last one was nasty: Cascading Tasks.
Cascading Tasks is the simple idea that when you have a dependency chain of A->B->C->D as soon as one of the tasks starts to run late, all of the tasks dependent on it should shirt. Well, it seems simple at first. It gets a little more complicated when you have multiple chain culminating in a single task: A->B->C->D and E->F->G->D but even that is pretty clear.
It gets really complicated when you have A->B->C as children of dynamic task D and E->F->G are dependent on D. When you update A, B, or C, the later of those should change which should update D which might update E, F, and G.
There are about 8 more scenarios that I’m not going to go into because I didn’t think of them and they’re wildly complicated. Luckily, my new best friend – Ray Cannon of Bluebeach Solutions in Kent, England – worked out each of the different scenarios, tested them extensively – providing complete results – and even sent some screenshots along when I asked for clarification.
I can’t say “thank you” loud enough or often enough to Ray Cannon.
And here’s the thing… he’s not a developer. He didn’t provide any code. He didn’t even point out where the issues might be. He simply came up with a bunch of ideas of how it should work, tried them out, and let us know the results. There’s nothing preventing you from doing the same...
Oh… and by the way, that means we have ZERO open issues for v1.0. We’re going to do some last checking and validation and roll the Official v1.0 release very shortly.
If you’re still looking to help out somewhere, we need a few things:
- Try out web2project – Download web2project and give it a spin. If you’re a dotProject user, try converting and upgrading and let us know what you think;
- Feedback is always welcome – we’re collecting questions and fielding support requests in the forums but bugs and feature requests are handled in our issue tracker;
- Reviews are important – web2project was dropped from Wikipedia last month for not having a v1.0 out and lacking any third party reviews. We’re working on the first part, you can help on the second;
- Designers are always welcome – As with most Open Source projects, some consider our layouts… ugly. If you have design improvements or cleanups to the underlying html, please share them;
- Developers are needed – As much as a stickler I am for testing, we don’t have any useful Unit Tests for web2project. On the backend, we need to provide testing for the Projects, Tasks, and Companies modules – aka the most important onces – but will branch out from there as needed. Any assistance would be appreciated.
Note to regular readers: After we reach v1.0 of web2project, I promise to talk about other things. 😉