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Lesson 3: Assign iteration and task durations

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:

  1. In the WBS tree, expand the "Develop MySoftware module" project.
  2. 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.
  3. In the row corresponding to the "Develop project creation framework" task, double-click the Duration (Exp) cell. Enter the duration as three days.
  4. Double-click the Duration (Exp) cell for the "Run unit tests" task, and enter the Duration as three days.
  5. Assign expected durations to all the project tasks as indicated in the following table:
    Table 1. Task durations
    Name 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.
  6. 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.

Lesson checkpoint

In this lesson, you learned about the following concepts and tasks:
  • Calculation of project schedules, and schedule roll up
  • Durations and the project elements that they are applicable to
  • How to assign durations to project tasks
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