Jeroen, I agree with you that the data model is worked out before the UI. I think the engineering documentation supports this perspective too, but it's a lame excuse at this point since I can't find the reference; Browsing the engineering requirements seems to indicate how central the data model is to planning. Of course, use cases help to shape it, and therefore underlying requirements of the UI also.
Developing dotProject according to existing project management software reminds me of a dog chasing its tail. Isn't our goal something greater? There are plenty of opportunities here to create an outstanding package that's integrated into the resource pool as part of an enterprise system. Comments I've read and heard from other PMs suggests that there is no leading canned PM software on the market; They all have significant quirks.
I agree also with "Jades idea of categorizing tasks in order to get statistical info that can be used for forecasting." This is useful when 1. doing lots of similar project 2. when using a pool of resources for lots of different projects and 3. when working on operations management "nonprojects".
Jeroen, you're right that operations management is strictly speaking not project management. However, project management and operations management are subsets of the system development cycle, and both share many MIS techniques we are discussing for dotProject.
The "can start after other tasks starts" dependency type may not be as popular as the ones Jade mentions, but it is useful in managing the system development cycle, and is consistent with starting new project phases while previous one(s) wind down (ie. clean-up tasks). Best to be thorough as possible by including this option to save having to rewrite this package due to oversight of an integral function.
Jade, you mention tracking hours, days/schedule and people. Perhaps we can generalize tracking to resource consumption, and split from there ie. time, cost, resource count (of a type such as role), and perhaps consumption of other materials/resources required (optional and able to add more choices).
