Work package as a unification of issues and planning elements

After rebuilding the whole concept and architecture of issues and planning elements, in this last sprint we finally eliminated the issues completely in the OpenProject Rails 3 core.

Due to historically grown architecture, we initially built the whole timelines functionalities as a plugin - having two separate worlds: One with issues (in the core) and one with planning elements (as plugin) to be displayed in the timelines.

However, a project timeline with phases and milestones (mostly shown as Gantt chart) is the heart of a project. It therefore should be an essential feature of our software and included in the OpenProject core.
Also, the hard differentiation between issues and planning elements was not obvious. One does not only want to have Releases, Sprints or Milestones in this plan, but also the possibility to show and to link other elements in the timeline coming from issues (e.g. User Stories, Tasks, Bugs, …). So, why having issues and planning elements separated if after all it appears to be the same?

We took the rocky road to unify it, having only one element for the future instead of just harmonizing the user interface. And we finally got rid of all former issues and planning elements, having only work packages (e.g. in a task list view or in a project plan with Gantt chart).

So, let’s see where this will lead us with regard to collaborative project planning.

Technical Achievements

With the unification of issues and planning elements in work packages we are able to use the advantages of both worlds:

• work packages are as expressive as issues and planning elements by sharing attributes of both elements (e.g., custom fields and person responsible),
• work packages are part of the ticket view as well as timelines,
• work packages allow us to utilize former issue queries for timelines which will lead to reduced maintenance effort and opens new opportunities for performance improvements.

Migration

We are busy working out a migration path to bring elder instances with issues and planning elements to the new Rails 3 instance with integrated work packages.

Future prospects

Since we believe that project planning, including timeline functionalities, is one of the essential parts of project management, we think that we will more and more anchoring this feature in OpenProject. Our Vision is to head towards a collaborative planning approach:

• web-based interactive project planning,
• decentralized planning of different project teams,
• integration of planning data in custom-specific adaptive timeline reports with different views and aggregation,
• identification of dependencies and bottlenecks with early warnings and re-planning-functionalities.

If you like, let us hear your thoughts on this topic.

Example: Integration Management with adaptive timeline reports, e.g. configured for a project manager*

*Adaptive timeline reports can be configured for any kind of planning perspective or planning horizon based on the decentralized planning.