LaTeX-like Project Management

With project management role comes the need for a project scheduling tool.  The obvious choice would be Microsoft Project, but I thought I'd rather look for some free programs first.

I tried two that are very similar to MS-Project: OpenProj and GanttProject.  Both are open-source software.  Both have a GUI that's centered around a Gantt chart, and allow you to manipulate activities as in MS-Project.  But both also lack a very basic feature: resource leveling.  They don't have any intelligence whatsoever, and the user must check by himself that resources are not overloaded, and correct issues by adding spurious precedence or 'starts after' constraints.  I therefore don't really see how to actually use these tools for any serious work...

But then I discovered The TaskJuggler.  It's a command-line program written in Ruby that will read a text file and output HTML pages with various reports like a gantt chart or a resource allocation graph.  Installing the tool is as easy (once/if you have Ruby) as typing 'gem install taskjuggler'.

Using a text file as the input for all your project data has important benefits. The first one is that you can make use of your Source Management system to allow multiple people to collaborate on the file, while with a binary file (or even a text file that's completely rewritten by your tool when you save it) can't effectively permit sharing.  Another is that changes are much easier to track, as a change to a single part of the project will not touch the rest of the file.  So it's possible to revert individual changes...

This very much reminds me the difference between a word processing program, and LaTeX...


Here are some screenshots:

The Gantt chart

The resource allocation chart

And here is an example of a trivial project file. You'll find a much more complete example of a project file in the tutorial that is provided with the project.

project tiny "Example TJ3 Project"  2012-01-09 +12m {
  timezone "Europe/Paris"
}

resource Xavier "Xavier Nodet" {}

resource dev "Developers" {
  managers Xavier
  resource dev1 "Dev1" {}
  resource dev2 "Dev2" {}
}

task Tiny "Our Tiny Project" {
  responsible Xavier

  task t1 "Task 1" {
    
    task sub1 "Sub-task 1.1" {
      effort 30d
      allocate dev1
    }
    task sub2 "Sub-task 1.2" {
      effort 10d
      allocate dev1
    }
  }

  task t2 "Task 2" {
    effort 20d
    allocate dev2
    depends !t1.sub1
  }
  
  task deliveries "Milestones" {

    task start "Project start" {
      start ${projectstart}
    }
    
    task ega "EGA" {
      start 2012-11-01
      depends !!t1, !!t2
    }
  }
}

# Skipping the report generation part...

I only scratched the surface so far, but this seems very promising to me...