There is a very interesting post by Gordon Fuller on the Ask Edward Tufte forum on the usefulness of Gantt and PERT charts:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/744545307/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=000076&topic_id=1&topic=Ask%20E%2eT%2eHe asks the question: is it important to see the relationships of all tasks, or only the ones where problems are occuring?
It seems to me that he's making a very good point. Instead of showing all the tasks, and how they relate to each other, we should show what is most important:
- the critical path is important
- when looking at an individual task, the dependencies of surrounding tasks are important
- when looking at lots of projects at once, you don't care about individual tasks as much, unless there are problems.
Perhaps a better Gantt chart would show a project at once, with some sort of annotation showing tasks that are problematic (overscheduled, have no slip time, are behind schedule, have not been started even though they should be by now, etc..)
This may be something to think about later as we design the views for dotProject.
