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Gantt charts are tools for planning and scheduling. It got Hoover Dam done two years ahead of schedule. It'll probably be useful for your Rails app, too.

• 1123581321 10y ago
  Yes, they work well in operations that have many parallel steps which must be performed once, correctly, and in the correct time and order, and where the effort is quantifiable. While Hoover Dam was constructed on an unprecedented scale, the project planners could still do reliable man-hour calculations for many parts of the project. Most software development projects lack those properties. Many software projects live or die by how well the "last 90%" of development goes (as opposed to a public works project which has much more critical initial work), but a Gantt chart usually represents that entire effort with one bar.
  • tacos 10y ago
    It's a bar chart; you're free to plot whatever subset of data you wish. If you're working with a team and you can't represent at least the next few weeks on a Gantt chart you're not engineering--you're playing software bumper cars. Having team members sign up for brief work items (2-3 days max), charting it out, then watching where it strains is useful and often humbling.