V9 Personal Information

[sonicviz]

Hi,
I recently upgraded from V7.5 to latest V9.
It's great but I can't for the life of me figure out some of the project management features.

The learning centre is a nice feature, but (correct me if I am wrong) both that and the quickstart help skip completely project setup.

So after playing around with it I finally figured out you need to modify the settings on a new project, add authors and resources, risks etc.
But testing the task display under project information/personal information I can add tasks/issues just fine in both project/personal info views but they only show up in project information, not personal information. I am set up as the author under options/general ok.

How does the project know who I am in order to properly show the tasks allocated to me. I tested both owner and assigned fields.
I am using V9 Professsional.

ty.

[RoyC]

You make some good points, which we would like to follow up on. Please could you submit one or more requests to Sparx Support (could be a straight email, or a feature request, or even a bug report if you want to couch it in those terms).

The points you make are, however, rather broad. I'm not sure exactly how or where you are creating tasks, assigning resources, defining people, entering names etc. Could you make your bug report(s) specific so that we can pinpoint the problem and guide you accordingly. That will also factor in to the development of Learning Center/Help/White Paper documentation of the whole process of setting up a project, not just creating a model.

Thanks very much for your help.

[sonicviz]

Hi,
Thanks for the quick reply.

I'll submit it as a feature request, as I am not sure if it's a bug or just lack of clarity in workflow documentation.

You make some good points, which we would like to follow up on. Please could you submit one or more requests to Sparx Support (could be a straight email, or a feature request, or even a bug report if you want to couch it in those terms).

The points you make are, however, rather broad. I'm not sure exactly how or where you are creating tasks, assigning resources, defining people, entering names etc. Could you make your bug report(s) specific so that we can pinpoint the problem and guide you accordingly. That will also factor in to the development of Learning Center/Help/White Paper documentation of the whole process of setting up a project, not just creating a model.

Thanks very much for your help.

I'm creating tasks in two ways - from the Personal Information Task pane and the Project Information Task pane. Additionally it seems (again correct me if I am wrong but I have hunted through all settings/options I can see) there is no way to set your own custom categories for task priority or type. For example, the sort on priority is alpha, which puts medium after low etc. Custom types would be great to allow grouping of tasks by functional area (or even custom subtype), esp if you are using block time to focus on particular sections (ie: for game design/dev prototyping, graphics, AI, physics, Art, SoundFX, Music etc etc)

ty

[sonicviz]

Sent:
Hi,
Thanks for the quick reply to my forum post http://www.sparxsystems.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?num=1308798367/0

as per my reply here is my feature request.

I am not sure if it's a bug or just lack of clarity in workflow documentation.

>>I'm not sure exactly how or where you are creating tasks, assigning resources, defining people, entering names etc.

There are a couple of issues.


Before creating the test tasks I wen to project settings and added people and some custom risk categories. It took me ages to find this but it seems a logical first step that should be highlighted in the doc as the very first step after creating a project .. or be part of a new project wizard. Or maybe it is and I missed it?

I'm creating tasks in two ways - from the Personal Information Task pane and the Project Information Task pane. They show fine  in the Porject Information pane but will not show up in the personal information task pane no matter what resource I select. It implies it's related to user, but I have no idea how the program knows which user I am? I am using EA Professional 9 btw.

Also, For example, the sort on priority is alpha, which puts medium after low etc.  Would be great to have numeric priorities that sort correctly (yes, you can filiter but sometimes you like a sorted list as a motivator - or demotivator!;-)

Additionally it seems (again correct me if I am wrong but I have hunted through all settings/options I can see) there is no way to set your own custom categories for task priority or type. Custom types would be great to allow grouping of tasks by functional area (or even custom subtype), esp if you are using block time to focus on particular sections (ie: for game design/dev prototyping, graphics, AI, physics, Art, SoundFX, Music etc etc)

Cheers,
Paul Cohen
Shibuya-Ku
Tokyo, Japan

[sonicviz]

Edit:
Looks like I can use Phase as a hack to sort by subtype, but Task sorting does not seem to work on all fields.

[sonicviz]

Update:
The personal information view is now showing the tasks.
This happened after I closed and restarted EA, so for some reason it was not showing them when I entered them initially.

ty!

[Dave_Bullet]

The learning centre appears to be feature based - not task or processed based.

There needs to be a "flow" overlayed on the very useful information.

This is especially obvious for EA features with pre-conditions or setup work required (as noted above).  These pre-conditions drive the flow.

Would would be even better is context sensitive setup windows.  When you open a setup or other EA window without preconditions met - the user gets the option to jump to that particular setup (without having to refer to the learning centre or manually navigate the menu system).  quite often - these operations are done rarely - so learning how to do them is pointless.  guiding the user is better on the rare occasions model setup is required.