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The "Will it be done before/at the unreasonable deadline?" report.


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Indeed. I think the most interesting and worthwhile reporting hinges on having pretty rich metadata attached to the tickets, so you can answer questions like how many man-hours did feature X take? how much over the estimate was that? how consistent is that compared with prior similar features? stacking up the critical path from now until release, and given the present estimates and past history, what timeframe are we looking at?

But to really get anywhere with that you need everyone to have put in the required metadata, to be correctly linking tickets that block each other, to be providing estimates upfront and tracking time, to be accurately capturing the work in tickets. You also need people not to be sandbagging and then using the "extra" time to perform localized refactors and other cleanup that they can't otherwise get buy-in for.


This was exactly what LiquidPlanner did (probably does?). I can't speak for it today, but it was built as planning and scheduling first, task management second.

As a bonus we handled everything a ranges (that task? 1-4 days) so you'd get results like: this project is 90% likely to be done by a given date, 98% by this much later date you're going to hate.


$15 monthly per user, and I can't even demo the software without scheduling an appointment? LiquidPlanner might be the greatest software in the world but I can not schedule an appointment for a demo - my opportunities are far too spontaneous for that. This seems like software for people who like to schedule things - I need software for people who are forced to schedule things.

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