In this lesson, you will learn how to assign expected durations
to the iterations and tasks in your project. Summary task duration
is rolled up from the constituent tasks.
Use the Schedule Gantt viewlet to perform
this task. In the navigation bar, click Work,
and click the Schedule tab.
In
the previous lesson, you added WBS elements to your project.
In
the Schedule Gantt viewlet, notice the expected start and finish dates
and duration for each of the elements that you added. The start and
finish dates correspond to the project start and finish date. The
duration of each element is one day. In its current state, the project
and all of its activities are set to complete in one day. The reason
for this is that we have neither performed any scheduling for the
project elements, nor have we created dependencies between the project
activities that produce a particular order. In this lesson and the
ones that follow it, you will perform the scheduling for the project.
Calculation of schedules: When
you assign durations to tasks, the end dates of the tasks are calculated
based on the available working days in the project calendar. For example,
in the current state of your project, all tasks are scheduled to start
from the same date, which is the project start date. Consider a task
in your project where the start date is Friday, November 20, 2009,
and all Saturdays and Sundays are weekly holidays in the project calendar.
Assign a duration of three days to the task. The End date will be
displayed as Tuesday, 24 November, 2009.
Schedule roll up:
When a WBS element has child elements, the schedule dates of the parent
element are rolled up from the schedule dates of the child elements.
The start and end dates of the parent are the earliest start date
and latest finish date of all the child elements, and the duration
is the number of working days between these dates.
To
assign task durations:
- In the WBS tree, expand the "Develop MySoftware module"
project.
- Begin my assigning fixed durations to each of the iterations.
In the WBS Schedule Gantt viewlet, in the row corresponding to Iteration
1, double-click the Duration (Exp) cell. Enter the duration as 14
days. Repeat this step for Iteration 2.
Note: In the WBS
tree, when you select an element, in the viewlet grid, the corresponding
row for the element is highlighted.
- In the row corresponding to the "Develop project creation
framework" task, double-click the Duration (Exp) cell. Enter the duration
as three days.
- Double-click the Duration (Exp) cell for the "Run unit
tests" task, and enter the Duration as three days.
- Assign expected durations to all the project tasks as indicated
in the following table:
Table 1. Task durationsName |
Duration (days) |
Iteration 1, and 2 |
14 |
Develop project creation framework |
3 |
Run unit tests (for project creation) |
3 |
Deliver Iteration 1 build |
1 |
Write scheduling rules |
2 |
Develop scheduling algorithm |
3 |
Run unit tests (for scheduling algorithm) |
3 |
Write integration code |
2 |
Run unit tests (for integration) |
2 |
Run system tests |
5 |
Deliver final build |
1 |
Note: The default constraint for all the tasks
is 'As soon as possible'. We will not change the constraint for this
tutorial.
- Click Save.
After assigning the duration, in the Schedule Gantt viewlet,
look at the expected finish dates for each of these tasks. You will
see the finish dates are changed to accommodate the assigned durations.
Summary task durations and finish dates are rolled up from the constituent
tasks. The project finish date and duration are also rolled up from
the tasks - the project duration is the duration of the longest task
(five days), and the finish date of the project is the finish date
of the last task. Iteration dates are the dates you specified, and
are not rolled up from the dates of the work items planned
for the iteration.
Notice that the project schedule is still not
realistic, because all the tasks are scheduled to start on the same
date, despite tasks that must obviously be completed in sequence.
Also, the project duration is only five days, but the project will
evidently take longer to complete. These issues will be addressed
in the next lesson, where you will assign dependencies to tasks.