Dear all,

I have a feature request for the gantt charting facility. Since I am very used to the agile story concept, I am going to write my request as a user story:

h2. Story

As a user of the redmine software
I would like the gantt charting facility to consider the (remaining) effort estimated as a duration of an issue (if no due date is given)
so that I can use the gantt charting facility to estimate the expected end date of my project.

h2. Business reason

We are thinking very agile. So we do not commit to deadlines, but instead continuously estimate the end date of our projects. Redmine's gantt chart works very fine if you connect issues and set due dates. But if you only set "Estimated time" instead of due dates, then the gantt charts treat every issue as a one day task. So setting due dates would be necessary, to maximize the value of the gantt chart. Unfortunately, if you have a very agile project, with lots of new task coming in frequently, you would have to maintain these due dates continuously. This is cumbersome work, and does not create any value.
Therefore we would highly appreciate, if the gantt chart would consider the (remaining) estimated time instead, allowing us not to maintain due dates manually as a must.

h2. Acceptance criteria

It is possible to set a "maximum workload per day" in hours, which gives an indication of how much estimated time of issues can be done on one working day¶

the feasible domain of "maximum workload per day" is (0,Inf) hours (consider teams, which can get more than 8h a day done)¶

"maximum workload per day" can be maintained in the administration of the project¶

"maximum workload per day" can be different per project¶

If no due date for an issue is set, then¶

the remaining estimated (work) time can be calculated as estimated time minus effort spent (or zero if already negative)¶

the (implicit) due date for this issue can be estimated as today plus the remaining estimated (work) time divided by maximum workload per day¶

the gantt charting facility considers the (implicit) due date for generating the gantt charts for these issues instead.¶

I would highly appreciate if you would consider this feature request for the future of redmine. Furthermore I appreciate any feedback on my feature request.

Thanks for building a great software.

Best regards,
Sascha Herrmann