If you use the same task for two different people, how would the system
know how much of that task load to put one each person? And if one
person does 2 hours of work on a 6 hour task, does that mean that the
system should split remaining 4 hours between the two people, or 1 hour
to the one that has done some work, and 3 hours to the other.

Creating two tasks is how you would control this.

Cheers,
Geoff

On 11/11/2010 12:23 PM, hop wrote:

How will RTC 3.0 planning work with ressources in case of multiple
people working on the same task (e.g. pair programming)?
If I have to copy each task to the number of ressources, planning
becomes cumbersome.
If I let two people work on the same task and assign that task to only
one of them, the other ressource will look like having spare time and
unused capacity. Therefore the Gantt chart or agile time projection
won't be correkt.

Hi,

in 3.x the Time tracking capability would probably allow to, if you change owners, put in the time for more than one person.

I don't think the MS project import gives you that granularity. I can't go into details there, since I am just now starting to look into it.

Otherwise, you can still put in the work done one it. You will however not be able to easily see who did the work. It is in the history only.

As Geoff mentioned to do what you really want we have the roll up functionality that rolls up efforts from Child tasks to top level work items.

The approach having only one tasks and several people being responsible has so many disadvantages, that I concur with Geoff: don't do it. It is ambiguous, who is responsible to do what, what the status of the work is etc.

I assume you can do it in a co-located agile team. The organization saved by not creating the tasks would be informal and you would loose the fine grained data in your plans, simply because the data needed is not there.

The planning does not know who is planning on doing how much work for the task. So it can't process the resource load just to mention another issue.

In addition, RTC assumes a single owner and a lot of views are created using that assumption e.g. my work, planning grouped by owner,.....

The best suggestion I think is to use a work item template to create the top level task you want to be done with a child work item. You could let the users create their own tasks.

Having said that, if you still want to try it otherwise, one way to manage that more than one person is suggested to work on a work item task can be implemented using an additional attribute for the "workers". This way the users would be able to query for their work. Still I would suggest to let them create child tasks to track their work against the top level task.

For 2.x I'd suggest to look into http://jazz.net/library/article/381.

Ralph

Sorry for my late reply. The "Notify me" doesn't seem to work :(

Doing what you suggested I would end up multiplying the number of tasks with the number of users participating. That's what I didn't want to do in the first place.
How about an idea like in traditional planning where spent and planned hours are kept separately for each worker on a task?
In that scenario shared information (like description of the task, links etc.) are kept together and only per-worker-information is split.
BTW how does the MS-Project importer handle this situation?

Best regards
Franz-Josef

If you use the same task for two different people, how would the system
know how much of that task load to put one each person? And if one
person does 2 hours of work on a 6 hour task, does that mean that the
system should split remaining 4 hours between the two people, or 1 hour
to the one that has done some work, and 3 hours to the other.

Creating two tasks is how you would control this.

Cheers,
Geoff

On 11/11/2010 12:23 PM, hop wrote:

How will RTC 3.0 planning work with ressources in case of multiple
people working on the same task (e.g. pair programming)?
If I have to copy each task to the number of ressources, planning
becomes cumbersome.
If I let two people work on the same task and assign that task to only
one of them, the other ressource will look like having spare time and
unused capacity. Therefore the Gantt chart or agile time projection
won't be correkt.

Franz-Josef,

I'd suggest you do it. Would be great you provide the results here.

Ralph

Hi,

Thanks a lot for your answer.

I see the point of beeing more precise in planning and reporting.
On the other hand I'm still interested in avoiding unnecessary planning activities and this especially for non-agile projects.

I don't think the MS project import gives you that granularity. I can't go into details there, since I am just now starting to look into it.

Are you going to look how MS project import will handle activities with multiple ressources assigned? Or should I do on my own?

Best regards
Franz-Josef

Hi Franz-Josef,

thanks for letting us know. This is by the way more than I expected and might be related to how it is handled in MS project.

Thanks,

Ralph

Ralph,

You were right!
MS Project import creates an extra task for each ressource assigned to an activity in the MS Project plan.
That doesn't solve my initial problem, but is at least consistent with RTC planning strategy.

Franz-Josef

Ralph,

Ok, I'll do it (as soon as I get a RTC 3.0 up and running).

Franz-Josef

Franz-Josef,

I'd suggest you do it. Would be great you provide the results here.

Ralph