[news.eclipse.technology.epf] Re: Lack of Process Overview

[joerg.leuser@xxxxxxxxxxx (Jörg Leuser)]

Hi,

I am using EPF to document structured processes (which means there are 
many Phases, Iterations and Activities in a hierarchy). The result is that 
at the lowest level only a couple of tasks compose the parent 
phase/iteration/activity and therefore the graphs for the parents are 
quite small (in the sense of context).

danny wrote:
> My users/readers complain that they 'loose context' when they click down 
> into a graph.
Yes, I also get such responses.

> Padraig O'Leary wrote:
> > My main problem is the lack of process overview when using EPF. It's a 
> > shame that EPF is unable to generate a graph of all artefacts and tasks. 
> > As a work around I have used Visio to manually draw process overview 
> > diagrams.
> > Have other people encountered this problem? Are there any plans in the 
> > future for an overview feature in EPF?
> From my experience, the users want to have the question answered 'What is 
the complete process' when you introduce a new process to them. When they 
got the overview, they are mainly interested in their parts of the process 
(for which EPF works quite well). With the graphs generated by/with EPF, 
you can't present an overview easily because you don't have graphs that 
show multiple hierarchy-levels of your process. Therefore you either 
remove the hierarchical modelling from your process or you generate the 
overview graphs manually to get overview graphs.

I would appreciate if it would be possible to generate such process 
overview graphs within EPF because generating them manually and keeping 
them up to date is a lot of work and error-prone. 
However, it would be nice if it was still possible to hide some 
tasks/artifacts from such overview graphs so only the important ones are 
visible.

Regards,
Jörg
---
Jörg Leuser
Group Research and Advanced Engineering, Ulm
Daimler AG