I also want exactly this and have so far not found an example. I think most software is geared towards "good-enough" problem fitting, where only people who both understand the fundamental structure beneath planning, and care enough to want to implement it correctly, will want a DAG solution. However, I'm already working on quality DAG UI code so I'm tempted to divert temporarily to build such a tool if there's a market for it I'm not aware of.

Perhaps a weekend project/"show HN" to gauge interest would be warranted.

If you have time, please do, and if it's usable enough - task DAG, ability to add estimates in durations ("1 week", and not "2019-11-18 to 2019-11-25"), ability to add labels/tags and to search by it, and the ability to display tasks as a graph with critical path highlighted - you'll have your first paying customer right here.

If you ever get around working on this, or even demoing your DAG UI (I'm interested in UIs for DAGs for other reasons too), please shoot me an e-mail (address in my profile).

I've just sent you an email - I was on the fence about building this previously but I'll definitely get something going now.

Yes! Even if only for my personal tasks, yes!

Subtasks with intelligent dependencies, durations, and maybe top level item prioritization... I'd give up my hand rolled Google sheets idea in a heartbeat.

if you drop me an email (my address is in my profile), I can let you know when I have something to share :)

Yes!! I’d be interested too (email in my profile as well).

Great! I'll drop you an email shortly

Oddly most of these systems will let you specify dependencies, but not show them. Even the good old GANTT chart would let you do that. JIRA has umpteen kinds of "ticket X relates to Y" one of which is "depends on".

I think it's some sort of weird cultural impedance mismatch where the teams have sort of moved over to Kanban or Scrum or whatever, but the managing structures haven't. I used to work somewhere where managers spent a regular big chunk of time manually reconstructing GANTT from Microsoft TFS Kanban boards...

It's a doubly weird cultural impedance mismatch, because I am a dev, and I used to laugh at all the MBA PM gaant PERT mumbo jumbo... until I spent some time re-evaluating my work experience, thinking about what kind of things I'd like to improve in the way my team and I manage our work... and realized I'd very much like a DAG and a GAANT chart and critical path determination.

Have you tried Microsoft Project or the various web SaaS clones? The ones with the task hierarchy on the left (of arbitrary depth) and a Gantt chart on the right. I think they all support entering effort estimates (like “5 days work”), dependencies, and so on.

Was there something you didn’t like about them?

Haven't seen MS Project in a decade. I haven't found any SaaS like it, but maybe I don't know the right keywords to search for.

I came across this list https://thedigitalprojectmanager.com/microsoft-project-alter... (scroll down for the screenshots of the various products) but I haven't used any of the tools on that list. But they're certainly out there.

I used https://liquidplanner.com/ for a bit, it was clunky and slow and expensive, but did get the job done for what I needed.

I wonder if SmartSheet can do this - it’s pretty flexible and let you change visualizations but the underlying data can easily have the relationships you seek since it started as a GANNT tool. I haven’t played with custom templates much but your thoughts might be a good reason to go experiment!

Phabricator does this! It even renders a nice outline view of all your task dependencies. You can built arbitrary m:n graphs between your tasks and view them as a table with current state and so on.