# Tutorial: Your First Project

We have mentioned already that TaskJuggler uses plain text files that describe the project to schedule it. As you will see now, the syntax of these files is easy to understand and very intuitive. This chapter will walk you step by step through your first project. You create the project plan for a made-up accounting software project. Refer to for a full listing of the example. This project demonstrates some of the basic features of TaskJuggler; for more advanced features please refer to .

## Starting the project

To start a TaskJuggler project file you need to use the project property.

    project acso "Accounting Software" "1.0" 2002-01-16 - 2002-04-26 {
      now 2002-03-04
      timeformat "%Y-%m-%d"
      currency "EUR"
      scenario plan "Plan" {
        # Mark all paths as critical that have less than 10% slack time.
        minslackrate 10.0
        scenario delayed "Delayed"
      }
    }

It tells TaskJuggler the default project ID, a short name for your project, a version number and a start and end date. The start and end dates don't need to be exact, but must enclose all tasks. They specify the time interval the TaskJuggler scheduler will use to fit the tasks in. So, make it large enough for all your tasks to fit in. But don't make it too large, because this will result in longer scheduling times and higher memory consumption.

All TaskJuggler properties have a certain number of fixed attributes and a set of optional attributes. Optional attributes are always enclosed in curly braces. In this example we use the optional attributes now to set the current day for the scheduler to another value than to the moment your invoke TaskJuggler. We pick a day in the specified project period and we will always get the same results of a TaskJuggler run, no matter when we process our first project. The currency attribute specifies the unit of currency values.

Because each culture has it's own way of specifying dates, the format is configurable. Use the timeformat attribute to specify the default format. This is the format used for reports. It's not the format that you use in TaskJuggler project files. This format is fixed and must be Year-Month-Day-Hours:Minutes:Seconds-Timezone. All values after day are optional.

In this tutorial we would like to compare two scenarios of the project. The first scenario is the one that we have planned. The second scenario is how it really happened. The two scenarios have the same task structure, but the start and end dates of the task may vary. In reality we assume that the project got delayed, so we call the second scenario "Delayed". The scenario property is used to specify the scenarios. The delayed scenario is nested into the plan scenario. This tells TaskJuggler to use all values from the plan scenario also for the delayed scenario unless the delay scenario has it's own values. We'll see further below, how to specify values for a scenario.

Certain attributes are scenario specific. These have to be included in the scenario definition. In this example, we use the minslackrate attribute to specify the percentage of slack time a task path must at least have before it is considered a critical path. Tasks on critical paths are marked with a red frame in the graphical user interface.

## Global Attributes

Besides finding suitable start and end dates of our project, we also like to do a simple profit and loss analysis. So we have to specify the default daily costs of an employee. This can be changed for certain employees later, but it illustrates an important concept of TaskJuggler – inheritance of attributes. In order to reduce the size of the TaskJuggler project file to a readable minimum, properties inherit many optional attributes from their enclosing scopes. We'll see further below, what this actually means. Here we are at top-level scope, so this is the default for all following properties.

    rate 310.0

The rate attribute can be used to specify the daily costs of resources. All subsequent resources will have this rate unless specified differently.

You might also want to tell TaskJuggler about holidays that affect all resources. Global vacations are periods where TaskJuggler does not do any resource assignments to tasks.

    # Register Good Friday as a global holiday for all resources.
    vacation "Good Friday" 2002-03-29

Use the vacation attribute to define a global vacation. Global vacations must have a name and a date or date range. This is slightly different from vacations of individual resources. They are defined with the vacation attribute for resources and are unnamed.

Macros are another TaskJuggler feature to keep project files small. Macros are text patterns that can be defined once and inserted multiple times in the project file. A macro always has a name and the text pattern is enclosed by square brackets.

    macro allocate_developers [
      allocate dev1
      allocate dev2 { limits { dailymax 4h } }
      allocate dev3
    ]

To use the macro you simply have to write `${allocate_developers}` and TaskJuggler will replace the term `${allocate_developers}` with the pattern. We will use this macro further below in the example and then explain the meaning of the pattern.

## Declaring Resources

A TaskJuggler feature that you will probably make heavy use of is flags. Once declared you can attach them to many properties. When you generate reports of the TaskJuggler results, you can use the flags to filter out information and limit the report to exactly those details that you want to have included.

    flags team

    resource dev "Developers" {
      resource dev1 "Paul Smith" { rate 330.0 }
      resource dev2 "Sébastien Bono"
      resource dev3 "Klaus Müller" { vacation 2002-02-01 - 2002-02-05 }

      flags team
    }
    resource misc "The Others" {
      resource test "Peter Murphy" { limits { dailymax 6.4h } rate 240.0 }
      resource doc "Dim Sung" { rate 280.0 }

      flags team
    }

This snippet of the example shows the resource property. Resources always have an ID and a Name. IDs may only consist of the characters a to z, A to Z and the underscore. All but the first characters may be digits 0 to 9 as well. All global TaskJuggler properties have IDs. They need to be unique within their property class. The ID is necessary so that we can reference the property again later without having to write the potentially much longer name. Names are strings and as such enclosed in double quotes. Strings may contain any character, even non-ASCII characters. As you can see, resource properties can be nested: `dev` is a virtual resource, a team that consists of three other resources.

`dev1`, alias Paul Smith, costs more than the normal employee. So the declaration of `dev1` overwrites the inherited default rate with a new value of 330.0. The default value has been inherited from the enclosing scope, resource `dev`, which in turn has inherited it from the global scope.

The declaration of the resource Klaus Müller uses another optional attribute. With vacation you can specify a certain time interval where the resource is not available.

Here you need to understand how TaskJuggler handles time intervals. Internally, TaskJuggler uses the number of seconds after January 1st, 1970 to store any date. So all dates are actually stored with an accuracy of 1 second. `2002-02-01` specifies midnight February 1st, 2002. Again following the TaskJuggler concept of requiring as little information as necessary and extending the rest with sensible defaults, TaskJuggler adds the time 0:00:00 if nothing else has been specified. So the vacation ends on midnight February 5th, 2002. Well, almost. Every time you specify a time interval, the end date is not included in the interval. But the second before the date that you have specified is. So Klaus Müllers vacation ends 23:59:59 on February 4th, 2002.

Peter Murphy only works 6.4 hours a day. So we use the limits attribute to limit his daily working hours. We could also define exact working hours using the shift property, but we ignore this for now.

Note that we have attached the flag `team` after the declaration of the sub-resources to the team resources. This way, these flags don't get handed down to the sub-resources. If we would have declared the flags before the sub-resources, then they would have the flags attached as well.

## Declaring Accounts

The use of our resources will create costs. For a profit and loss analysis, we need to balance the costs against the customer payments. In order not to get lost with all the various amounts, we declare 3 accounts to credit the amounts to. We create one account for the development costs, one for the documentation costs, and one for the customer payments.

    account dev "Development" cost
    account doc "Documentation" cost
    account rev "Payments" revenue

The account property has three fixed attributes: an ID, a name, and a type. The type can either be `cost` or `revenue`. For the analysis TaskJuggler subtracts the total amount of all cost accounts from the total amount from all revenue accounts.

Accounts can also be nested. Nested accounts may not have a type specified. They inherit the type of the top-level account.

## Specifying the Tasks

Let's focus on the real work now. The project should solve a problem: the creation of an accounting software. Because the job is quite complicated, we break it down into several subtasks. We need to do a specification, develop the software, test the software, and write a manual. In TaskJuggler syntax this would look as follows:

    task AcSo "Accounting Software" {
      task spec "Specification"
      task software "Software Development"
      task test "Software testing"
      task deliveries "Milestones"
    }

Similar to resources, tasks are declared by using the task keyword followed by an ID and a name string. All TaskJuggler properties have their own namespaces. This means, that it is quite OK to have a resource and a task with the same ID. Tasks may have optional attributes which can be tasks again, so tasks can be nested. In contrast to all other TaskJuggler properties, task IDs inherit the ID of the enclosing task as a prefix to the ID. The full ID of the `spec` task is `AcSo.spec`.

To track important milestones of the project, we also added a task called Milestones. This task, like most of the other tasks will get some subtasks later on. We consider the specification task simple enough, so we don't have to break it into further subtasks. So let's add some more details to it.

      task spec "Specification" {
        effort 20d
        ${allocate_developers}
        depends !deliveries.start
      }

The effort to complete the task is specified with 20 man-days. Alternatively we could have used the length attribute or the duration attribute. `length` specifies the duration of the task in working days while `duration` specifies the duration in calendar days. Contrary to effort, these two don't have to have a specification of the involved resources. Since `effort` specifies the duration in man-days, we need to say who should be allocated to the task. The task won't finish before the resources could be allocated long enough to reach the specified effort. Tasks with `length` or `duration` criteria and allocated resources will last exactly as long as requested. Resources will be allocated only if available.

Here we use the `allocate_developers` macro mentioned above. The expression

    ${allocate_developers}

is simply expanded to

      allocate dev1
      allocate dev2 { limits { dailymax 4h } }
      allocate dev3

If you need to allocate the same bunch of people to several tasks, the macro saves you some typing. You could have written the allocate attributes directly instead of using the macro. Since the allocation of multiple resources to a task is a very common place for macro usage, we found it a good idea to use it in this example as well.

One more interesting thing to note is the fact that we like the resource `dev2` only to work 50% of the day on this task, so we use the optional attribute limits to specify this.

For TaskJuggler to schedule a task, it needs to know either the start and end criteria of a task, or one of them and a duration specification. The start and end criteria can either be fixed dates or relative dates. Relative dates are specifications of the type "task B starts after task A has finished". Or in other words, task B depends on task A. In this example the `spec` task depends on a subtasks of the `deliveries` task. We have not specified it yet, but it has the local ID `start`.

To specify the dependency between the two tasks, we use the depends attribute. This attribute must be followed by one or more task IDs. If more than one ID is specified, each ID has to be separated with a comma from the previous one. Task IDs can be either absolute IDs or relative IDs. An absolute ID of a task is the ID of this task prepended by the IDs of all enclosing tasks. The task IDs are separated by a dot from each other. The absolute ID of the specification task would be `AcSo.spec`.

Relative IDs always start with one or more exclamation marks. Each exclamation mark moves the scope to the next enclosing task. So `!deliveries.start` is expanded to `AcSo.deliveries.start` since `AcSo` is the enclosing task of `deliveries`. Relative task IDs are a little bit confusing at first, but have a real advantage over absolute IDs. Sooner or later you want to move tasks around in your project and then it's a lot less likely that you have to fix dependency specifications of relative IDs.

The software development task is still too complex to specify it directly. So we split it further into subtasks.

      task software "Software Development" {
        priority 1000
        task database "Database coupling"
        task gui "Graphical User Interface"
        task backend "Back-End Functions"
      }

We use the priority attribute to mark the importance of the tasks. 500 is the default priority of top-level tasks. Setting the priority to 1000 marks the task as most important task, since the possible range is 1 (not important at all) to 1000 (ultimately important). `priority` is an attribute that is handed down to subtasks if specified before the subtasks' declaration. So all subtasks of `software` have a priority of 1000 as well, unless they have their own priority definition.

      task database "Database coupling" {
        effort 20d
        depends !!spec
        allocate dev1, dev2
      }

The work on the database coupling should not start before the specification has been finished. So we again use the depends attribute to let TaskJuggler know about this. This time we use two exclamation marks for the relative ID. The first one puts us in the scope of the enclosing `software` task. The second one is to get into the `AcSo` scope that contains the `spec` tasks. This time we allocate resources directly without using a macro.

      task gui "Graphical User Interface" {
        effort 35d
        delayed:effort 40d
        depends !database, !backend
        allocate dev2, dev3
      }

TaskJuggler can schedule your project for two different scenarios. We have called the first scenario "plan" scenario and the second "delayed" scenario. Many of the reports allow you to put the values of both scenarios side by side to each other, so you can compare the two scenarios. All scenario-specific values that are not explicitly stated for the delayed scenario are taken from the plan scenario. So the user only has to specify the values that differ in the delayed scenario. The two scenarios must have the same task structure and the same dependencies. But the start and end dates of tasks as well as the duration may vary. In the example we have planned the work on the graphical user interface to be 35 man-days. It turned out that we actually needed 40 man-days. By prefixing the start effort attribute with `delayed:`, the effort value for the delayed scenario can be specified.

      task backend "Back-End Functions" {
        effort 30d
        complete 95
        depends !database, !!spec
        allocate dev1
        allocate dev2
      }

By default, TaskJuggler assumes that all tasks are on schedule. Sometimes you want to generate reports that show how much of a task has actually been completed. TaskJuggler uses the current date for this, unless you have specified another date using the now attribute. If a task is ahead of schedule or late, this can be specified using the complete attribute. This specifies how many percent of the task have been completed up to the current date. In our case the back-end implementation is slightly ahead of schedule as we will see from the report.

      task test "Software testing" {

        task alpha "Alpha Test" {
          effort 1w
          depends !!software
          allocate test, dev2
        }

        task beta "Beta Test" {
          effort 4w
          depends !alpha
          allocate test, dev1
        }
      }

The software testing task has been split up into an alpha and a beta test task. The interesting thing here is, that efforts can not only be specified as man-days, but also man-weeks, man-hours, etc. By default, TaskJuggler assumes a man-week is 40 man-hours or 5 man-days. These values can be changed using the dailyworkinghours attribute.

Let's go back to the outermost task again. At the beginning of the example we stated that we want to credit all development work to one account with ID `dev` and all documentation work to the account `doc`. To achieve this, we use the attribute `account` to credit all tasks to the `dev` account.

    task AcSo "Accounting Software" {

      account dev

      task software "Software Development" {

Since we specify the attribute for the top-level task before we declare any subtasks, this attribute will be inherited by all subtasks and their subtasks and so on. The only exception is the writing of the manual. We need to change the account for this task again, as it is also a subtask of `AcSo`.

      task manual "Manual" {
        effort 10w
        depends !deliveries.start
        allocate doc, dev3
        account doc
      }

## Specifying Milestones

All tasks that have been discussed so far, had a certain duration. We did not always specify the duration explicitly, but we expect them to last for a certain period of time. Sometimes you just want to capture a certain moment in your project plan. These moments are usually called milestones, since they have some level of importance for the progress of the project.

TaskJuggler has support for milestones as well. They are handled as special types of tasks. By using the optional attribute milestone for a task, this task is declared a milestone. Milestones have no duration, so it's illegal to specify any duration criteria, or a non identical start and end date.

      task deliveries "Milestones" {

        account rev

        task start "Project start" {
          milestone
          start 2002-01-16
          delayed:start 2002-01-20
          startcredit 33000.0
        }

        task prev "Technology Preview" {
          milestone
          depends !!software.backend
          startcredit 13000.0
        }

        task beta "Beta version" {
          milestone
          depends !!test.alpha
          startcredit 13000.0
        }

        task done "Ship Product to customer" {
          milestone
          # maxend 2002-04-17
          depends !!test.beta, !!manual
          startcredit 14000.0
        }
      }
    }

We have put all important milestones of the project as subtasks of the `deliveries` task. This way they show up nicely grouped in the reports. All milestones either have a dependency or a fixed start date. For the first milestone we have used the attribute start to set a fixed start date. All other tasks have direct or indirect dependencies on this task. Moving back the start date will slip the whole project. This has actually happened, so we use the `delayed:` prefix again to specify the start date for the delayed scenario.

Every milestone is linked to a customer payment. By using the startcredit attribute we can credit the specified amount to the account associated with this task. Since we have assigned the `rev` account to the enclosing task, all milestones will use this account as well.

Did you notice the line in the task `done` that starts with a hash? This line is commented out. If TaskJuggler finds a hash, it ignores the rest of the line. This way you can include comments in your project. The maxend attribute specifies that the task should end no later than the specified date. This information is not used for scheduling, but only for checking the schedule afterwards. Since the task will end later than the specified date, commenting out the line would trigger a warning.

Now the project has been completely specified. Stopping here would result in a valid TaskJuggler file that could be processed and scheduled. But no reports would be generated to visualize the results.

## Generating Reports of the scheduled Project

TaskJuggler offers a number of report types. Probably the most popular ones are interactive reports and HTML reports.

### Generating Interactive Reports

Interactive reports are only available in the TaskJuggler GUI. The command line version will just ignore interactive report definitions. To view a task report in the GUI, you have to add the following lines to your project. This will give you a list of all the project's tasks and the classical Gantt chart.

    taskreport "Gantt Chart" {
      headline "Project Gantt Chart"
      columns hierarchindex, name, start, end, effort, duration, chart
      timeformat "%a %Y-%m-%d"
      loadunit days
      hideresource 1
    }

The GUI requires the `name` column to be present in the report. If you don't specify it, it will be added automatically. It does not support any of the index columns. They will not be shown in the GUI. Nonetheless, it's a good idea to request it, as the printed version of the interactive reports behave like the other reports. They only show specified columns. The printed reports repeat the first column on every page in case it does not fit on a single page. To print a report from the GUI just select `File->Print` from the menu or click the printer icon in the toolbar.

For this report we like to have the abbreviated weekday in front of the date. `%a` is the tag for this. See the manual for a complete list of all options.

We don't want to see any resources in this report, so we hide them all. 1 means always hide a resource. To show all resources we could write a 0, which means never hide a resource. Or we could write a logical expression that only shows the leaf resources and sorts them by name as we did for the next report. It's a list of all tasks showing the resources assigned to each task.

    taskreport "Task Usage" {
      headline "Task Usage Report"
      columns hierarchindex, name, start, end, effort { title "Work" }, duration,
        cost, revenue
      timeformat "%Y-%m-%d"
      loadunit days
      hideresource ~isLeaf()
      sortresources nameup
    }

The default title for the `effort` column is replaced with a custom title. Additionally we show the cost and revenue of all tasks and resources. All loads are shown as resource-days.

The next report is similar to the first one, but has the completion degree as additional column.

    # A list of all tasks with the percentage complete for each task
    taskreport "Tracking Gantt" {
      headline "Tracking Gantt Chart"
      columns hierarchindex, name, start, end, effort { title "Work" }, duration,
        completed, chart
      timeformat "%a %Y-%m-%d"
      loadunit days
      hideresource 1
    }

We can also have resource-centric reports. This is done with the report type resourcereport. The following report is showing resource allocation. It identifies whether each resource is under- or over-allocated for.

    resourcereport "Resource Graph" {
      headline "Resource Allocation Graph"
      columns no, name, rate, utilization, freeload, chart
      loadunit days
      hidetask 1
    }

The next report is a list of all project resources, both human and material resources, together with the associated costs.

    resourcereport "Resource Sheet" {
      headline "Resource Sheet"
      columns no, name, efficiency, id, maxeffort, rate
      loadunit days
      hidetask 1
    }

The next report is similar to the previous one, but also lists the tasks for each of the resources. It also provides details about the cost for each resource and task.

    # A list of resources and each task associated with each resource.
    resourcereport "Resource Usage" {
      headline "Resource Usage Report"
      columns no, name, utilization, freeload, cost
      loadunit days
      hidetask 0
    }

### Generating HTML Reports

In addition to the interactive reports, TaskJuggler also provides HTML reports. These reports have the benefit that you can create report files that you can publish on a web server. TaskJuggler supports a variety of HTML reports. Please refer to the manual for a full list. In this tutorial we will only cover a subset of them.

The first HTML report looks like a regular calendar. It lists all ongoing tasks for each day.

    # This report looks like a regular calendar that shows the tasks by
    # their dates.
    htmlweeklycalendar "Calendar.html" {
    }

The next HTML report is a weekly status report. You can generate such a report each week to update your team, your management, and your clients about the current project status. The report lists all the events of the recent week and all upcoming new tasks for the next week.

    # This report is a status report for the current week. It also
    # provides an outlook for the next week.
    htmlstatusreport "Status-Report.html" {
    }

To conclude the HTML reports, a report is generated that shows how poorly the project is calculated. The company won't get rich with this project. Due to the slip, it actually needs a loan from the bank to pay the salaries.

    htmlaccountreport "Accounting.html" {
      columns no, name, scenario, total, monthly
      headline "P&L for the Project"
      caption "The table shows the profit and loss analysis as well as
               the cashflow situation of the Accounting Software Project."
      accumulate
      scenarios plan, delayed
    }

The htmlaccountreport property produces similar reports as the ones shown above, but it lists accounts instead of tasks or resources. The `total` column shows the value of the account at the end of the reported time interval. The accumulate attribute puts the calendar in accumulation mode. The monthly columns list the value of the account at the end of the month. Normally the amount that has been added or subtracted from the account would be listed.