ChiliProject is not maintained anymore. Please be advised that there will be no more updates.

We do not recommend that you setup new ChiliProject instances and we urge all existing users to migrate their data to a maintained system, e.g. Redmine. We will provide a migration script later. In the meantime, you can use the instructions by Christian Daehn.

Forums » Discuss »

How parent and sub-tasks display estimated time in issue list

Added by Stefan Hållén at 2011-03-01 08:51 am

The way it is now is actually fairly confusing, unless you actually sort by parent task (if I remember correctly), and even then, looking at the estimated time field is very confusing. You basically get a list like so:

  • (Parent) task 20h
  • (Sub) Task 1 5h
  • (Sub) Task 2 10h
  • (Sub) Task 3 5h

And there's no good way to just get a good overview over the estimated time for different tasks. I guess an list where you could expand tasks (and view there sub-tasks) or something like that would solve this?

Since this ended up being fairly confusing, I created categories for all major "tasks" of the project and used that instead. Much better when showing a client the issue list, but it would be nicer if we could get sub-tasks to be more useful instead :)


Replies (5)

RE: How parent and sub-tasks display estimated time in issue list - Added by Eric Davis at 2011-03-02 12:33 am

I can't find the screenshot right now but my original patch for subtasks had them in a tree view. It might make it easier for you to see an overview.

|Issue              20h
|- Sub Issue         5h
|- Sub Issue        10h
|-- SubSub Issue     5h   # Notice how the roll up
|-- SubSub Issue     5h
|- Sub Issue         5h

This view worked on the main issues list and also on the issue details page (it had an embedded issues list).

Eric Davis

RE: How parent and sub-tasks display estimated time in issue list - Added by Stefan Hållén at 2011-03-02 08:49 am

It's a wee bit better (you kind of get a similar structure already by sorting by parent task), but it's still not a good "overview" since you get all the details shown at the same time. Think of when starting up a project and you create and time estimate everything that needs to be implemented to comply to a design. For me that usually ends up in 50-200 issues created and estimated. How do you get a good overview over how time is needed?

With subtasks (why are they called tasks btw? is it issues or tasks? :)) you COULD present this in a variety of ways, and doing it as an expandable list of issues would probably give you a good overview?

RE: How parent and sub-tasks display estimated time in issue list - Added by Eric Davis at 2011-03-02 11:53 pm

I think there was also little arrows next to each one to collapse each group, so you could see:

|Issue              20h
|- Sub Issue         5h
|- Sub Issue        10h
|-- SubSub Issue     5h
|-- SubSub Issue     5h
|- Sub Issue         5h

|Issue              20h
|- Sub Issue         5h
|- Sub Issue        10h
|- Sub Issue         5h

|Issue              20h

Don't get me started about subtasks/subissues. The "language" used is inconsistent at best. ;)

Eric Davis

RE: How parent and sub-tasks display estimated time in issue list - Added by Stefan Hållén at 2011-03-03 07:57 am

That'd work a treat if there was a way to START in the "collapsed" view. Maybe it would be possible to add a "expand N issue sub-levels" to the queries? Then one could just store overview queries as needed.

RE: How parent and sub-tasks display estimated time in issue list - Added by Jan Wedekind at 2011-06-06 01:10 pm

Hi Stefan,

Here's how I solve that: I put the main task under a specific version but not the subtasks. Then I can filter the issue list very easily to get an overview. If I want to drill down, I click on the main task which then directly shows it's subtasks.

Makes also sense for the development process I think. You can make a kind of "backlog" of main issues and break that down then into smaller more tangible pieces. But it's hard to know in the planning stage, in which version you'll most likely tackle each subtask...

Maybe that helps!

Cheers,
Jan

(1-5/5)