Award Sounds

I've written before about using OpenProj as a suitable open-source application for project management. Now that I've more chance to use it in anger (e.g. with projects consisting of over 200 tasks), I've noticed a number of anomalies. Mainly these occur in the scheduling.

My current view is that I will not continue using OpenProj. First of all is the lack of community around the application. I started writing this post a couple of months ago. I'd looked at the community forums/Q&A and noticed that questions had been left unanswered for a number of months. It didn't bode well. Add to this the lack of documentation and bells start ringing. As open-source, it's not uncommon for an application to have little documentation, but then they usually have an active userbase to compensate.

Functionally, I found that creating projects dependent on end dates, rather than starting with a start date and planning forwards, was a nightmare. It would start out ok, with a few tasks, but get to around 200 tasks where you have to make some adjustments to durations and a few fixed dates, then I'd find that the dependency chain would be wrong. Other similar anomalies crept in to the point that the application couldn't be used. My guess is that the application isn't wrong, it's just that it doesn't enforce the dependency chain. For instance, if Task A has to finish before Task B starts, then I expected the application to manage that. It didn't, well not when we got to 200 tasks. Shame. It also didn't manage resource levelling, but then again, it didn't advertise that it did. I expected to have to level the plan manually but that didn't work out because the plan wouldn't respond to me setting duration. I tried different settings of Fixed Units, Fixed Duration, Fixed Effort and Effort Driven but to no avail.

As mentioned at the top, I started this article a couple of months ago, but got stuck into a project so didn't publish it. I've just had a quick look at the Serena/OpenProj website and documentation is still lacking. The forum over at sourceforge seems to have picked up a bit, but not enough that I'd want to be dependent on the application.