Project 2010 Beta CRITICAL BUG in allocation algorithm

I decided to go ahead and download Project 2010 Beta and give it a test run an start taking advantage of the team planner feature.

By having a single view of the team i save a lot of time by not being required to jump back and forth, great feature.

while working in this version i saw a very strange behavior that i am sure is a critical bug related to bug in the algorithm of leveling, The scenario is built out of the following tasks:

Tasks

  • Stabilization is dependent on bug fixes finish.
  • first and third tasks are being done by the same resource
  • the priority of the stabilization is higher than all
  • Stabilization has a constrain of “Start no earlier than” 1/Dec/09 (which is before Bug fixing finishes)

When leveling the allocation with Priority, Standard and hour by hour you get In Office 2010:

AllocationProblem_2010

While in Office 2007 you get:

AllocationProblem_2007

So why is there a different in level result, In office 2010 the outcome is bug , as it seem project is not taking into account the predecessor constrain (Tests CANNOT start before bugs are fixed)

Am i missing anything here?!

The solution (for now) is to remove the constrain of Start no earlier than from the task and move it to the summery task

[UPDATE 12/Dec/09] I got response from Microsoft:

We are sorry this issue is causing you problems but with any beta, you have to be aware that there will be issues since you are using pre-released software. As I said below, there are two ways to work around this issue. You can re-install Project 2007 on the same machine you have Project 2010 on. This way you can use Project 2007 for your real project management work, and then the 2010 beta more for testing out the software. Alternatively, you can directly link the subtasks instead of the summary task and you will not hit this issue.

I am considering to remove the application now as i feel too much like QA person, rather than end customer (even if this is beta), I would expect the CORE of the allocation mechanism to be as stable as possible (and be under automatic test – which i understand its not)

Project 2010 Beta CRITICAL BUG in allocation algorithm Project 2010 Beta CRITICAL BUG in allocation algorithm Reviewed by Ran Davidovitz on 12:50 PM Rating: 5

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ran,

It is considered best practice to keep the dependencies on detail tasks and you will get the results you want. I do not agree that you post this as a Critical Bug in Microsoft Project.

Respectfully,

Eric Uyttewaal,
Author "Forecast Scheduling with Project 2010"

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