Chirp was actually designed to be an application that explicitly did NOT put in these concepts. Here is our philosophy, and why we are hesitant to add this feature to Chirp.
Though they are well-understood within general project management circles, our analysis has shown that Gantt charts and dependency features are the single thing that causes most (novice) users to have difficulty using project management software, and is the biggest reason they abandon using it. The typical problems users have is that they:
- Get frustrated trying to figure out how to represent dependencies, especially when there are > 1 precedent tasks or precedent sub-projects;
- Spend significant (and frustrating) time trying to figure how to adjust project schedules and tasks to meet fixed deadlines when intermediate, precedent tasks are not delivered on time. Since, in many cases, external factors dictate that delivery dates cannot change, users will get sucked into spending time with their project management software trying to re-arrange the project to fit a date.
In the end, the usual result of a intermediate task schedule slip is that a team (or customer) will change the deliverable requirements, or make other major changes in allocations of work in order to meet deadlines. Chirp is designed to help people communicate progress, alert teams to possible issues, and then let the team sort out the solution - not tempt users to spend time on dependency time line analysis.
Our experience with Chirp so far is that people - once they learn to change from chart analysis to team discussion - become more comfortable with this approach. Chirp's lack of Gantt charts also makes Chirp more appealing to users that are NOT and do not want to be project management experts - which is the majority of our user base.
So Gantt / timeline capabilities take users in a direction Chirp is specifically designed to omit, and is not likely to appear on our roadmap. We hope this answer does not dissuade you from using Chirp. In fact, we hope that - with experience - you'll find Chirp's approach better than the Gantt/dependency approach.
TinyURL for this article: http://tinyurl.com/y2s94s
