looping task relationship

[davegb]

I have a client who does development work. They have a number of tasks
with what I call "looping" relationships. Like Develop/Test.
Development starts on a certain day. Test starts a day or 2 later
(SS+2). But Development and test essentially end the same day, however
long that may take (that's another issue, estimating such durations).
In older versions of Project, I could cut and paste start dates and
end dates to create more complex links between tasks, such as this
loop. I haven't done this in several years, and was surprised to find
I can't do it in Project 2003. I do remember that doing this could
cause instability at times. Maybe that's why it's not allowed now.
Does anyone have a good way to create this kind of relationship? I
also used this same technique to create hammock tasks. Is there a way
to do this in P2003?
Thanks for the help.

David G. Bellamy
Bellamy Consulting

 

[Mark Durrenberger]

Looping is not allowed in Project. I usually advise my clients to estimate
the number of times through the loop and repeat the steps in the loop that
many times. So in your wbs you might have (assuming 3 times through the
loop)

build 1
test 1
build 2
test 2
build 3
test 3

Estimate the effort and duration for each activity (you might assume that
the 2nd and 3rd times through the loop that durations might be shorter than
the first time through the loop)

Here is info on doing hammock tasks:
http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm#Hammock Tasks

Hope that helps.
Mark


--
_________________________________________________________
Mark Durrenberger, PMP
Principal, Oak Associates, Inc, www.oakinc.com
"Advancing the Theory and Practice of Project Management"
________________________________________________________

The nicest thing about NOT planning is that failure
comes as a complete surprise and is not preceded by
a period of worry and depression.

- Sir John Harvey-Jones

 

[davegb]

Mark,
Thanks for your reply. After making this query, I started remembering
how I did this years ago. Your solution is definitely worakable, but
part of the problem is that the developers are actually working on
some of the code while the testers are testing, and vice versa. So
doing a series of tasks as you suggest leaves availability in their
schedules they don't really have.
What we did before was to give the 2 tasks a SS+lag relationship, to
reflect that test starts a few days, usually, after coding. Most of
the time, they end at nearly the same time. Since you can only have
one relationship between tasks in MS Project, you can't use a link to
reflect this. Instead, I copy the finish date of coding and "paste
link" it into testing. This way, if the process takes longer than
planned, I just add duration to coding and testing extends out
accordingly.
BTW, this also avoids cluttering up the schedule with a plethora of
code/test tasks, hard to tell apart from one another unless you also
put in some text saying which code/test cycle this is. That in itself
can be a lot of data entry.
There is always many different ways of working around such problems in
Project. Am always interested in other's solutions.

David G. Bellamy
Bellamy Consulting