Time Tracking: what do you think?
Gregg's asking for your feedback on time tracking for software development projects...an issue that brings up all sorts of responses:
You mention time tracking, and you get mixed emotions. Executives feel they need it. Developers and Testers hate doing it. Managers get sick of nagging people to “enter their timesheets”.
Please read his thoughts on why and more importantly let us know what you think.
Thanks!
Comments
Anonymous
April 23, 2007
As part of the sharpowl development team we develop time-recording software.. and thus use our own software to record our own time. So we ensure the time-recording process is as as possible - using pre-filled from our MS project interface :-)Anonymous
June 05, 2007
Its important to distinguish between labor tracking and timecarding. While you and your manager may expect you to be at work 40-50 hours a week (timecarding), I care about the amount of productive work time that I have to contribute towards my deliverables. There are many "overhead" items like review conversations, company meetings, team morale events, all hands, etc that contribute to the overall health and welfare of the organization, but actually intrude on my ability to get my functional spec written. So I want to see the difference between my available capacity (frequently known as "task time") and my work week (40-50 hours). My task time may be 10-15 hours per week. If I track my time as I create, review, inspect and socialize my spec, I learn what my steps are, create a repeatable work breakdown structure so I avoid making the same mistakes, and create history I can use to make my future estimates more effective. My team has built an extension to TFS to track task time and associate it with task work items, and will extend it to track time against defects, so we can see which are the most costly defects in terms of time to find/fix.Anonymous
January 09, 2008
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