Comment by tappio

Thank you for the hard work in this space! I think it is really important that there is a proper open source solution available.

I just found OptaPlanner and subsequently TimeFold few months ago, as I was searching for a solution for my wife's veterinary clinics employee scheduling problem. The problem is not big enough for anyone to pay for the solution, but big enough to cause stress for whom ever is dealing with manually doings the shifts.

It was interesting that there were a lot of online SaaS providers that claim to solve the problem but they just simply are not configurable for all kinds of constraints of a real workplace.

Unfortunately I also feel partially same with TimeFold, because designing those constraints really requires changing the way of thinking of many problems. While the engine is capable of doing what ever, there is a steep learning curve to do it.

So while the article mentions documentation, I would say that the documentation is far from sufficient for wide adaption.

Personally, I would have really needed documentation about a mental model of thinking about the problem, and then a ton of examples how to solve real employee scheduling problems. Problem written in a format which the business people use and then translated into an elegant constraint rule explained step by step.

I had to invest more than 40 hours to get a working MVP that solves real problems, not just those that are already coded in the example code. Most people are not willing to do that.

What I'm trying to say is that to making planner software popular, it should be also usable for trivial projects. I understand that it's hard to focus on everything, but just providing more information about real use cases and how they were solved and how to think about the design problems would make the market bigger, and bring you a lot more customers in the long run.

I just wonder how I might contribute to improve the documentation. I probably don't have deep enough understanding of the correct solution, but I will look into it.