Software Project Scheduling - Timeline Charts

What is a timeline chart ? Well, a project timeline is created to display the various activities of a project on a chart, in such a way that it depicts the tasks of the projects, the duration of the tasks, the sequencing of these, and the major milestones of the project. A Gantt chart is a typical software timeline chart, and the most popular one that most people tasked with preparing such a chart are aware of.

In timeline charts, a series of events are arranged on a bar graph. These charts are like user items. Each event can be a single point in time or a date range. A timeline chart enables the planner (and other stakeholders) to determine the set of tasks that will need to happen at a given point of time. The effort, duration and start date are inputs for each task. These tasks can be assigned to specific individuals. With these inputs, mapped on a chart, the timeline chart is developed. It is also called Gantt chart and it can be developed for the entire project. When the Gantt chart was first developed, it was a revolutionary construct in the field of project management.

The format of a timeline chart depicts the part of software project schedules that emphasize the concept scoping task for the product on which work is happening. All work tasks are located on the left hand column. The duration of each task is indicated by the horizontal bars. The diamonds indicate the task concurrency which indicates when multiple bars occur at the same time.

Project tables are tabular listing of all project tasks. Project tables are produced when all the information which is necessary for the generation of timeline charts are obtained. These project tables consists of all project tasks, its start and end date and the related information.