P2 Engine 3.2.2

Date: 24/08/2012.

 (check your P2 Engine version)

New functions added: We are currently working on improving copy constructors for P2 Project, P2 Schedule and P2Resource.

• P2Project:copy_constructor: Copies all project data into a another project object.
• P2Schedule:copy_constructor: Copies all schedule data into a another schedule object.
• P2Resource:copy_constructor: Copies all resource data into a another resource object.

Important improvement in P2 Engine (not applicable in ProTrack)

• The calculation of the Earned Schedule (ES) metric has been improved. Although it was not wrong, the assumption of ProTrack is that the minimal unit of time is 1 hour. Since project managers (i.e. ProTrack users) express activity durations in multiples of hours (e.g. days, weeks, months), the ES metric will be an integer value in hours (minimal unit) but a fractional value in days (e.g. 10 hours (integer) is 1d2h in ProTrack (1 day = 8 hours)). In other words, the precision of the ES metric is expressed in hours, which is fine for a real project manager. However, P2 Engine users (certainly the researchers) do not care about the time unit. They just use a value (e.g. 2, which might mean 2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months, or 2 hours, it often is irrelevant to them). However, P2 Engine will assume that the user means 2 hours (2 days must have a value 16 as input). No problem so far, but the ES calculation will not be very precise. Suppose the EV at the current time is equal to € 3.40 and the PV at time 5 is € 3.00 and at time 6 is € 5.00 than the ES is equal to
  • ES in ProTrack: ES = 5 (precision is 1 hour!)
  • ES in= 5 + (3.4 - 3.00) / (5.00 - 3.00) = 5.20

Consequently, the 0.2 hours is a small rounding down error in ProTrack and totally neglectable when durations are expressed in multiples of hours, but might be important to P2 Engine users. Therefore, the P2 Engine 3.2.2 update will report 5.2 time units instead of 5.0 as was done in the previous P2 Engine versions (internal procedure = calculate_tracking_ES_with_resources, not visible to users).

Bugs found

• Wrong output values in P2Tracking:get_real_project_cost and P2Tracking:get_real_project_duration in some situations: problem solved.
• Small bug solved in P2Tracking:set_actual_cost, P2Tracking:set_remaining_cost, P2Tracking:set_planned_actual_cost_deviation and P2Tracking:set_planned_remaining_cost_deviation: cost values are is float values instead of integer values.
• P2Generator:calculate_topological_structure: No input parameters are required (error reported by user).