7.3. Task Overview

As you saw earlier, it is possible to make a task which is a subtask of task 'Write documentation' which is in itself a task of 'The Ultimate Documentation Project 1.0'. Not impressed yet. Wait till you see this! Click on 'The Ultimate Documentation Project' link to jump to the project page. Now click on the 'Tasks Overview' link in the project details screen. You should see something like this:

There a couple of things I would like to talk you through. In the upper left corner of the screen (next to the menu) you see the total amount of workhours estimated for completion of the project. Below that you can see the amount of work already done. To the right of both of these you seen the total start date en end date for this project and the calculated percentage of work done. Below these headings are a number of rows with the following information. In the first field you see the sublevel of a task. Level 0 means that these are tasks linked tot he project itself. Level 1 tasks are subtasks of the aforementioned tasks, etc. To speedjump to a task detail screen we can click on the task name which is also clearly a link. Next to this you will see the percentage of completion of this task as well as the amount of workhours already spent on completion. Next is the tasks start date, a graphical representation if it's status and the end date. The meaning of these colors in the graphical presentation are as follows:

• White: No meaning, just a fill color.

• Red: Amount of work still left to be done.

• Green: Already finished part of the task.

The next column marked 'new' is an easy way to add a subtask to this task. The last column contains a checkbox you can use to easily change some aspects of the selected tasks. You click on the tasks you would like to change and then select the type of change in the dropdown listbox at the bottom of the screen. Select the correct type, enter a number if appropriate and click on 'OK'. The screen will be redrawn with the new data in place. You can choose from the following list of options:

• do nothing: Hm, how can I possibly explain this....

• Delete: Delete all the selected tasks (WITHOUT CONFIRMATION!).

• Set State to pre: Change the state of these tasks to 'pre'.

• Set State to ongoing: Change the state of these tasks to 'ongoing'.

• Set State to finished: Change the state of these tasks to 'finished'.

• Set State to overdue: Change the state of these tasks to 'overdue'.

• Reschedule: Enter next to it a numeric value off the number of days you want BOTH start- and enddate to shift.

• Reschedule start: Enter next to it a numeric value off the number of days you want the startdate to shift.

• Reschedule end: Enter next to it a numeric value off the number of days you want the enddate to shift.

Let's see how this works. Suppose we think that Bill is never going to make all his bugfixes in time so let's first click on the task and adjust the number of needed workhours to something smaller and even less realistic, say 80 hours. Next we return to this form and start shifting tasks around. So we select the 'get pencils' task and will shift it to a later date by, say, 30 days as shown in the next picture:

Now we click on the "OK" button and have a look at the results. As you can see in the next picture, the little red bar marking the total amount of time has shifted towards the right to indicate a later start and end date.

So far a small demonstration of possible graphics stuff in TUTOS but the next section will tell you an even better tale, the Gantt chart.