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Chapter 4. Concepts
In this chapter we look at all the important concepts of managing activities with openCRX from a user's perspective (if you are interested in the UML models of these concepts, please refer to the openCRX UML models). In particular, we will look at the following concepts:
Activity Tracker (used to group and categorize sets of activities and people related to them)
Activity (used to describe something that needs to get done)
Category (used to group activities that belong together)
Milestone (group activities that belong together because they relate to the same intermediate result/deliverable)
Participant (a person involved with an activity tracker)
Votes (people use votes to indicate support for an activity)
Work Records (describes an effort made in connection with an activity, e.g. to resolve an incident, prepare a meeting, etc.)
Activity Links (allows one to link activities)
Security (explains the difference between public and private activity trackers and provides other security-related information - administrators and other parties interested in the technical details of security should refer to the openCRX Security Guide) for an in-depth discussion of the security concepts implemented by openCRX)
Notes, Documents, and other Attachments (short introduction in different attachment types - notes, documents, and other media objects)
Activity Tracker
Activity Trackers are a powerful concept to add some structure to activities and people related to these activities, i.e. you can use them to group and categorize sets of activities, people related to these activities (we call them "participants"), work records, etc. For example, you could use an Activity Tracker to keep track of a product design project (i.e. all the project activities, milestones, project members, work records related to the project, etc.), a software development project (look at the use case Bug Tracking, a support contract with one of your customers, to manage your personal Personal To-Do List, etc.
In addition to activities and participants you can also attach categories, milestones, and work records to an Activity Tracker (all of these concepts are explained subsequently if you read on):
Anatomy of an Activity Tracker:
Name of the Activity Tracker
a short Description of the Activity Tracker
Welcome usually contains detailed information about the Activity Tracker, typically provided by the manager of the Activity Tracker to the other participants; participants new to an Activity Tracker should always read the Welcome before they start doing any work related to the Activity Tracker; if appropriate, make use of the HTML feature to add explicit structure (you can start the HTML editor by clicking on the small icon [HTML] located just above the input field)
hh (estimated effort) and mm (estimated effort) is information that is typically provided by the manager of the Activity Tracker - a guess on how many hours and minutes it takes to work through all the linked activities
Max deviation in % contains the maximum (expected) deviation of the actual effort from the estimated effort in % of the estimated effort - high values indicate the manager's low confidence in the accuracy of the estimated effort numbers
hh (actual effort) and mm (actual effort) are derived from the information contained in the linked work records; use the operation View > Calculate and Refresh. to update this information
various Charts are provided that summarize/aggregate information contained in objects related to the Activity Tracker at hand; a list of all the charts available is contained in the Grid tab Charts (see also section Reports for a discussion of charts); the manager of the Activity Tracker can select some of the charts to be displayed in the Inspector tab Charts of an Activity Tracker, every participant can select favorite charts to be displayed on the personal User Home.
To find out what is going on in the ecosystem of a tracker, explore the information that is available in the many Grids, e.g.
Activities contains a list of all the linked activities; various pre-defined filters allow you to organize this list to your liking, e.g. sorted by due date, sorted by priority, etc.
Tracker Categories contains a list of all the categories defined for this Activity Tracker (see Category for additional information)
Tracker Milestones contains a list of all the milestones defined for this Activity Tracker (see Milestone for additional information)
Participants contains a list of all the tracker participants (see Participant for additional information)
Work Records contains a list of all the work records submitted for activities linked to this Activity Tracker (see Work Records for additional information)
Please note that use of certain operations on Activity Trackers is restricted to Managers (see Participant)
