Project management software and scope creep

Project management is just one of those areas I keep coming back to, from a semantic standpoint. Since it's by definition a tool that every software development project must use (to paraphrase a financial management book I once read, if you have a project, you will manage it - the question is whether you'll manage it well or not), every software developer sooner or later takes a stab at building a project management tool.

As a result, the space is cluttered with three million solutions, all of which do more or less the same thing but expand out to include every aspect of life within an organization. This is scope creep.

Why does it happen? A lack of semantic explicitness.

Case in point - or rather, what's set me off this time: my son is doing a self-study course of AP Macroeconomics. To finish it by the time the AP exam rolls around in May, we have to make a schedule. And as I was doing that by hand with a calendar, of course, I thought: I should be doing this in Perl.

But you know what? CPAN doesn't really have anything that does that. And when I go off to find general project management tools in the open-source space (let's not even talk about the proprietary space!) I find at least a dozen contenders.

They all involve stack lock-in, to a greater or lesser extent, because, well, that's what syntactically specified software does.

And yet we all know roughly what's meant by project management. That is an area rife for a semantic approach. Sadly (or, well, it's not really sad) all my free-time development cycles are taken up by robotics these days. So this might have to stay on the back burner for another few years. But eventually I promise you....

Gantt charts and project management

Oh, look: an open-source Gantt chart editor.

Blimp project management API

Blimp is a project manager SAAS thing online which I hadn't heard of until now - and now they have an API.  That API would be a good place to look at what functionality a project manager should have.

Project management with Task Warrior

Task Warrior is a command-line tool for task management. It's really quite extensive. A project management domain could interface with it, say.

Target domain: project management

OK, OK, this is another clogged space. Still - I'd like to look closely at the semantics. Unfuddle.com is yet another target app. They make money, so ... I could, too, presumably. Why not? The key is to be able to iterate faster than other humans, and making your specific software a fungible expression of a fixed semantic domain is definitely the way to go.

Target domain: Project management

Here's another domain I've spent a lot of time thinking about in the past. And here are some open-source links to various GANNT chart options and open-source projects (thanks to a recent post on HNN, as always).

dotProject.net - what it says on the tin.

faces - seems to be a Python-based DSL for project planning or something.

OpenProj - what it says on the tin.

A page by Edward Tufte about alternative graphical languages for project presentation.

Two ways to make GANNT charts in LaTeX.