#59 BCWP calculations

[Julien Lamarche]

I thought I'd re-post to the ticketing system from my blog. I thought I might have found a bug the way bcwp was calculated. But I could be wrong, perhaps I misunderstood the intention of the code.

Are there different ways to calculate BCWP?

ProjectLibre, v 1.5, calculates it the following way:

:::java
        //[(Actual % of completion / Expected % of completion) of an activity for a given period] * Actual cost of activity
        public double bcwp(long start, long end) {
                if (!isInRange(start,end))
                        return NO_VALUE_DOUBLE;
                end = Math.min(end,getStatusDate());
                if (end == 0)
                        return 0.0D;
                if (AdvancedOption.getInstance().isEarnedValueFieldsCumulative())
                        start = getStart(); // start from the beginning of the task and ignore the range start
                double cost = actualCost(start,end);
                if (cost == 0)
                        return 0;
                return efficiency() * cost;
        }

When I saw this, my reaction was "Why would the actual cost be part of BCWP?". Wikipedia defines BCWP, as I learned in class, as BAC * % complete.

Now its possible that I'm misinterpreting the function actualCost. When programming, variable names can be confounded with their actual meaning as the code gets bigger and bigger

But when I set % complete to 100% for a task that was due to finish in the future, my SPI is still set to 1. My understanding is that it should be higher than 1. I talk more about this in the projectlibre community forum: http://www.projectlibre.org/discussion/how-bcwp-calculated

So, while acknowledging I could be misunderstanding the output and intent of the code, here's what I think it should be:

:::java
    // bac * percent complete -- cyclingzealot
    // Changed from:
    //[(Actual % of completion / Expected % of completion) of an activity for a given period] * Actual cost of activity
    public double bcwp(long start, long end) {
        if (!isInRange(start,end))
            return NO_VALUE_DOUBLE;
        end = Math.min(end,getStatusDate());
        if (end == 0)
            return 0.0D;
        if (AdvancedOption.getInstance().isEarnedValueFieldsCumulative())
            start = getStart(); // start from the beginning of the task and ignore the range start
        double bac = bac(0,DateTime.getMaxDate().getTime());
        double percentComplete = this.getPercentComplete();
        if (bac == 0)
            return 0;
        return percentComplete * bac;
        }

Again, totally possible I misunderstood the code. One thing I noticed is that start and end is used in the former calculation, whereas I'll get the bac from 0 to end. Its possible that the former code has use in calculating earned value through time.