Dependencies diagram view

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1

I’d love to see a diagram of all of my tasks that either depend on other tasks, or that have tasks that depend on them. If I could visualize them, it would help me immensely. The timeline view is sort of helpful, but I don’t actually want to assign due dates to things, and I don’t want to have to drag each task into the timeline to see whether it has any dependencies or not.

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2

+1 - This is very insightful. I could see how it would be useful.

3

I could not agree more. Not all of my tasks have hard due dates, but it would be great to have a network diagram of task dependencies.

1 Like
4

Yep, +1. I want to only show the critical path on the diagram…so can you exclude the >0 float tasks from the timeline?

5

I’m currently stumbling across the same limitation. It’d would be good to have a way to view this.

6

Is there any way to do that?

7

We definitively need this too!

8

Would love to have it as well!

9

+1 This feature would be really useful to me as well. I need to plan out a clear dependency tree before the meeting with the assignees where we actually decide the dates.

10

Agreed 100% ! Would love this feature

11

One more vote on this one. My project has dependencies, but not timelines. A dependency graph despite timelines would be super useful.

1 Like
12

Please this feature is so important. Having this would make so clear, what to do next.

When it comes to implementing this view I think using the Timeline is totally fine.

If a task B is blocked by another task A, simply visualize B one day later than A.
Every task (some other task depends on) is soft due today, meaning visualized in the timeline as today.

13

It’s certainly not a replacement for Asana developing this feature, but I was messing around with this today and wrote a little python script to generate a DOT diagram with this type of dependency graph.

The script is here: A quick click CLI tool to generate a DOT file from an asana project · GitHub

If people find it useful, I’d be happy to make the resulting diagrams a little more fleshed out. At the moment it just shows the name of each task with some arrows in a visualization.

1 Like
14

I’d love this feature too.
Being able to display a dependencies graph based on a selection of tasks (filtered)

15

+1

16

I absolutely want this too. Can I give my advice / hints to the Asana Product Managers for it?:

  1. Model dependencies (relationships) between tasks internally as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG).
  2. Acyclic means no cycles. This means you need to put in some validation to prevent this and warn the user. The user will want to know if they are about to create a circular dependency between their tasks anyway, so design a good UX around that and everyone will be happy.
  3. In the List View, create a special column type for Dependencies, but render it as a vertically oriented “gitflow” diagram. This allows for concurrency (parallelism) to be visualised as parallel vertical lines (i.e., if there is a task with two or more parallel lines beside it in the Dependencies column, that means it can be done in parallel with something else)
  4. As soon as you turn on dependency management for a project, you should immediately sort the DAG, add this column, and disable ordinary reordering logic: From now on the user should only be able to reorder in such a way that the dependencies are respected.
  5. Obviously reordering can still be done where no constraints are being violated, so the user should still be able to do that wherever possible.
  6. IF the user wants to reorder something in a way that violates dependencies, you should give them visual feedback (turn things red and highlighted), and immediately tell them which dependency would be violated, give them the option to either undo their change, or to edit/remove the dependency that will be violated. Done well, this should really help the user get their dependencies worked out properly.

Once you’ve got that nailed, you could consider implementing dependencies which link different levels of hierarchy and across projects as well. (e.g., Task X depends on the completion of Project Y, etc…)

The advantage of using a DAG is that traditionally a Gantt chart and every other work management tool assumes that dependencies should be basically implemented as a Tree (a hierarchy), but a DAG is a much more suitable and powerful mathematical tool.

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