LibrePlan

As we usually do at Igalia, this year we are present at CeBIT and, on this occasion, I will be the one representing the company and visiting Hanover (Germany). This trade show is a great continuation of the IT conference route that we have been ... [More] attending this early 2013: We started visiting CES (Las Vegas) on January, we continued attending FOSDEM with several lectures on February and we are going to the Mobile World Congress in two weeks’ time (just the week before my trip to CeBIT). As you know – and if you do not know it is the right moment for finding it out – in Igalia we are experts in several free software technologies. Highlights: We are the main company contributing to WebKit after the giants Apple and Google. It is great reading the name of your company in this recent stats published in Techcrunch. We have experience in hardware virtualization in QEMU and developing drivers for industrial hardware. We have a team of multimedia specialists in all layers of multimedia development (applications, middleware and hardware integration). We lead the accessibility in the GNOME project. We are the company developing LibrePlan. We have experience in interactive interfaces being the authors of Skeltrack (a free software library for skeleton tracking). So, if you are attending CeBIT and you want to have a beer to know more about Igalia, about how we can help you or how we can collaborate,  I will be really pleased to meet you up there. For that purpose,   just drop me an e-mail at [email protected] See you there!   [Less]

As we usually do at Igalia, this year we are present at CeBIT and, on this occasion, I will be the one representing the company and visiting Hanover (Germany). This trade show is a great continuation of the IT conference route that we have been ... [More] attending this early 2013: We started visiting CES (Las Vegas) on January, we continued attending FOSDEM with several lectures on February and we are going to the Mobile World Congress in two weeks’ time (just the week before my trip to CeBIT). As you know – and if you do not know it is the right moment for finding it out – in Igalia we are experts in several free software technologies. Highlights: We are the main company contributing to WebKit after the giants Apple and Google. It is great reading the name of your company in this recent stats published in Techcrunch. We have experience in hardware virtualization in QEMU and developing drivers for industrial hardware. We have a team of multimedia specialists in all layers of multimedia development (applications, middleware and hardware integration). We lead the accessibility in the GNOME project. We are the company developing LibrePlan. We have experience in interactive interfaces being the authors of Skeltrack (a free software library for skeleton tracking). So, if you are attending CeBIT and you want to have a beer to know more about Igalia, about how we can help you or how we can collaborate,  I will be really pleased to meet you up there. For that purpose,   just drop me an e-mail at [email protected] See you there!   [Less]

Hi all, It has been some time and Miciele has been very busy developing new stuff to add to LibrePlan. In this post I will try to tell you all about our latest modifications. Configuration database The first one is under the hood, … Lees verder →

TweetHi all, It has been some time and Miciele has been very busy developing new stuff to add to LibrePlan. In this post I will try to tell you all about our latest modifications. Configuration database The first one is under the hood, … Continue reading → The post Latest news about our LibrePlan development work appeared first on Jeroen Baten.

We have released an upgrade of the 1.3 LibrePlan version with some improvements and fixes, and a...

Introducing rolling wave planning Rolling wave planning is a project planning technique that basically consists of elaborating progressively the project plan over time. It is common that on starting to plan a project the project manager does not have ... [More] all the information needed to make an accurate and realistic planning. This usually happens with projects that have a significant duration. Therefore, to plan the whole project with a high level of detail in a first stage maybe is not the best idea: It is likely that as time passes the circumstances change because of intermediate results. For instance, it could happen that some activities, belonging to the first work packages to deliver, are delayed. New requirements and priorities can be set once the project has already started and this can trigger the need of a new planning process. With the rolling wave planning technique these inefficiencies and time penalties are avoided, the project manager can save time and, as a consequence, he can be focused on the activities that produce real value for the success of the projects. Actually, it can be seen that this practice is aligned with the principles advocated by project management agile methodologies, as Scrum.   How to make the most of rolling wave planning with LibrePlan One option, on applying rolling wave planning, is not to plan the future beyond a certain point in time at all. An interesting alternative approach is to make the decision to plan the future, but with a lower level of detail than the short term. This sounds really well but, however, you can think: and how can I do it regarding to task allocations? With my project management software I can allocate specific resources but I do not have a clue of how to do it with less detail! Here is when LibrePlan comes to rescue and how LibrePlan makes it possible is what I want briefly present in this post. In LibrePlan there are two types of resource allocations:  specific allocations, which are the standard ones in which you choose the employee you want to do a task and, generic allocations, where you define a set of criteria that the eligible resources must have configured. With LibrePlan you can define the custom criteria useful for your organization and classify the workers according to them. Once done, the planning engine, on applying the generic allocations, looks for the free resources satisfying the required criteria for a task and assigns them. The global load of the different criteria can be analyzed and the project manager is able to know if he has enough free resources per criterion over time. He can also make corrective decisions according to it.   So, as can be seen, you can do rolling wave planning with LibrePlan using the generic allocations. They allow you to know if you have enough resources in the future with the skills needed (or with other criteria). Besides, it is a light and course-grain way of allocating resources that makes possible to apply powerfully rolling wave planning without the penalties of having to spend time in detailed planning that you have to redo. [Less]

Introducing rolling wave planning Rolling wave planning is a project planning technique that basically consists of elaborating progressively the project plan over time. It is common that on starting to plan a project the project manager does not have ... [More] all the information needed to make an accurate and realistic planning. This usually happens with projects that have a significant duration. Therefore, to plan the whole project with a high level of detail in a first stage maybe is not the best idea: It is likely that as time passes the circumstances change because of intermediate results. For instance, it could happen that some activities, belonging to the first work packages to deliver, are delayed. New requirements and priorities can be set once the project has already started and this can trigger the need of a new planning process. With the rolling wave planning technique these inefficiencies and time penalties are avoided, the project manager can save time and, as a consequence, he can be focused on the activities that produce real value for the success of the projects. Actually, it can be seen that this practice is aligned with the principles advocated by project management agile methodologies, as Scrum.   How to make the most of rolling wave planning with LibrePlan One option, on applying rolling wave planning, is not to plan the future beyond a certain point in time at all. An interesting alternative approach is to make the decision to plan the future, but with a lower level of detail than the short term. This sounds really well but, however, you can think: and how can I do it regarding to task allocations? With my project management software I can allocate specific resources but I do not have a clue of how to do it with less detail! Here is when LibrePlan comes to rescue and how LibrePlan makes it possible is what I want briefly present in this post. In LibrePlan there are two types of resource allocations:  specific allocations, which are the standard ones in which you choose the employee you want to do a task and, generic allocations, where you define a set of criteria that the eligible resources must have configured. With LibrePlan you can define the custom criteria useful for your organization and classify the workers according to them. Once done, the planning engine, on applying the generic allocations, looks for the free resources satisfying the required criteria for a task and assigns them. The global load of the different criteria can be analyzed and the project manager is able to know if he has enough free resources per criterion over time. He can also make corrective decisions according to it.   So, as can be seen, you can do rolling wave planning with LibrePlan using the generic allocations. They allow you to know if you have enough resources in the future with the skills needed (or with other criteria). Besides, it is a light and course-grain way of allocating resources that makes possible to apply powerfully rolling wave planning without the penalties of having to spend time in detailed planning that you have to redo. [Less]

Allocations of resources to projects and tasks are probably the most complex information we have in LibrePlan. There are multiple types of allocations, many related entities and a high granularity, which basically means there are a lot of data and ... [More] queries are complex. At the same time, these data are very valuable to see the state of the company, for example through the different resource load charts. We have been working on a custom model to provide a more direct, faster access to these data. As you could expect, it is a really simple model: there is one row per resource or criterion and task, which will contain all the corresponding time allocated to that resource/task or criterion/task pair. To be able to have every pair in a single row, the allocation information is stored in a serialized array. There is also another row to store all the allocation information for every resource or criterion, to prevent having to retrieve more than one row to get the global allocation information of a resource or criterion. Of course, there is a lot of duplicated or redundant information in this model, but it’s done for the sake of performance. With all these elements in place, building the resource load screen becomes easier, and what’s more important, a lot faster: our tests with 1000 tasks and 50 projects revealed that the time to build the global resource load diagram decreased from 30 seconds to only 2 seconds in average. It’s more than ten times faster! There are still challenges that have to be beaten before these improvements can reach a production release, the most important one is keeping the new data model synchronized and updated. Until then, anybody can play with the new code in the branch resource-load-performance. [Less]

Allocations of resources to projects and tasks are probably the most complex information we have in LibrePlan. There are multiple types of allocations, many related entities and a high granularity, which basically means there are a lot of data and ... [More] queries are complex. At the same time, these data are very valuable to see the state of the company, for example through the different resource load charts. We have been working on a custom model to provide a more direct, faster access to these data. As you could expect, it is a really simple model: there is one row per resource or criterion and task, which will contain all the corresponding time allocated to that resource/task or criterion/task pair. To be able to have every pair in a single row, the allocation information is stored in a serialized array. There is also another row to store all the allocation information for every resource or criterion, to prevent having to retrieve more than one row to get the global allocation information of a resource or criterion. Of course, there is a lot of duplicated or redundant information in this model, but it’s done for the sake of performance. With all these elements in place, building the resource load screen becomes easier, and what’s more important, a lot faster: our tests with 1000 tasks and 50 projects revealed that the time to build the global resource load diagram decreased from 30 seconds to only 2 seconds in average. It’s more than ten times faster! There are still challenges that have to be beaten before these improvements can reach a production release, the most important one is keeping the new data model synchronized and updated. Until then, anybody can play with the new code in the branch resource-load-performance. [Less]

Allocations of resources to projects and tasks are probably the most complex information we have in LibrePlan. There are multiple types of allocations, many related entities and a high granularity, which basically means there are a lot of data and ... [More] queries are complex. At the same time, these data are very valuable to see the state of the company, for example through the different resource load charts. We have been working on a custom model to provide a more direct, faster access to these data. As you could expect, it is a really simple model: there is one row per resource or criterion and task, which will contain all the corresponding time allocated to that resource/task or criterion/task pair. To be able to have every pair in a single row, the allocation information is stored in a serialized array. There is also another row to store all the allocation information for every resource or criterion, to prevent having to retrieve more than one row to get the global allocation information of a resource or criterion. Of course, there is a lot of duplicated or redundant information in this model, but it’s done for the sake of performance. With all these elements in place, building the resource load screen becomes easier, and what’s more important, a lot faster: our tests with 1000 tasks and 50 projects revealed that the time to build the global resource load diagram decreased from 30 seconds to only 2 seconds in average. It’s more than ten times faster! There are still challenges that have to be beaten before these improvements can reach a production release, the most important one is keeping the new data model synchronized and updated. Until then, anybody can play with the new code in the branch resource-load-performance. [Less]