
Show HN: Plan/manage complex projects as a graph of dependencies - jordwest
https://twigtask.com/
======
jordwest
Hi HN, this is a side project I've been quietly working on in bits and pieces
over the past 9 months for my own use.

It's (yet another) project management tool built out of frustration with JIRA.
When planning out engineering projects I'd often get together with my team to
whiteboard a graph of what depends on what, so we'd know what we can work on
next concurrently. But entering those tasks into JIRA and setting up
dependencies would take longer than the whiteboarding session itself.

There are a lot of things I'd like to do with it, but I thought it was time to
share it with the world first and see if there's any interest in it.

Some future ideas:

    
    
      - Simultaneous collaboration/multiplayer mode
      - Assigning loose estimated ranges for each task's time, then using Monte Carlo to estimate the time to complete a goal.
      - Loose priorities
      - Kanban (that can automatically pop new tasks into todo when they're unblocked)
      - Mobile support
      - JIRA export

------
rman666
Isn’t this basically a Gantt chart tool and wasn’t this a big part of the
value of MacProject? I sure wish MacProject was still available. I’ve been
using Scapple for doing some of this.

~~~
jordwest
I'm not a big fan of Gantt charts because they force things into a timeline,
and tend to imply an order that things should be done (even when two tasks are
unrelated). I've found Gantt charts also to be a lot more rigid and less
flexible as you inevitably discover new requirements throughout the project.

TwigTask is more about capturing tasks that _can't_ be done until something
else is done. For example, you can't build the authentication flow until
you've created a table for user accounts. And, you can't release the project
until the authentication flow is done.

This is the first time I've seen Scapple, it's very interesting and a really
similar concept. The main difference seems that TwigTask is designed
specifically for task dependencies, rather than general mindmapping and note
linking.

