Teams WIT Tools : Time Tracking

Time Tracking - Part 3

Gregg Boer — Thu, 17 May 2007 18:29:00 GMT

Here's another blog about time tracking. One beef I have with most time tracking systems is that it confuses tracking status of tasks with tracking time. Here's the classic scenario:

You use MS Project to schedule a feature. Typically this means you have a summary task called "Feature" and several sub-tasks.
You estimate at all the sub-task levels, which rolls up to be the total estimate for "Feature"
Now you tell everyone to track time against the assigned tasks, by updating the Remaining and Completed work fields.

Here's the problem:

Not all time spent on "Feature" is tracked as Tasks. New stuff comes up all the time, and people don't (and shouldn't) update the schedule to reflect every new thing they discovered they had to do.
Most of the time, you really only need to track time against the Feature to get all the value out of time tracking. The extra granularity is rarely used and isn't really that valueable.

I believe an ideal system would:

Allow you to update Remaining work at the task level, so you can still track estimates/status per task
Allow you to update Completed work at the Feature level, and would be used to track ALL time spent on the feature, not just time associated with tasks.

If I had my way, I would get rid of "Completed Work" from the task field, and have a way to track time at a much high granularity.

Those are my thoughts. What do you think?

Time Tracking in TFS – Part 2

Gregg Boer — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 20:27:00 GMT

In my last entry on Time Tracking in TFS, I talked about the reasons why project teams don’t track time. I gave my opinion as to why it doesn’t happen, and asked for yours. The comments I received were very insightful, but didn’t answer my question J … which probably means my question was dumb.

Anyway, what I did get was that in general, people want to track time for two reasons: Billing and Software Estimation, but mostly for Billing.

What if there was a TFS-based application that runs on the client … say a gadget. Every day (or hour?) it pops and asks for a time entry. Since it knows what TFS work items you are working on and which ones require time entries, it can provide you a very tailored experienced for entering time. The engineer enters the time, presses OK, and goes on working.

Annoying? Helpful? What do you think?

Time Tracking in TFS

Gregg Boer — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 22:49:00 GMT

From the mind of Gregg Boer: This is the first of a series of my thoughts on time tracking in TFS.

OK, we have heard quite a bit on time tracking in TFS. People have asked when we are putting it in.

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”.

In my experience, very few teams actually do it, and if they do track time, even fewer use the data, unless your work is billable. Hardly anyone uses it to actually improve how the engineer software.

Why is that? I think there are three basic reasons why:

· It takes a great deal of infrastructure (tools) to track time effectively. Most teams don’t have this available to them.

· Most project managers confuse time tracking (recording history) with status tracking (predicting future) … so we get things like “Enter your completed work and your remaining work on your tasks”. Time tracking and status tracking are two different things.

· Most people don’t know what to do with the data, even if they did have it. I’ve seen too often were teams track time, but did nothing with the data.

Those are my thoughts, what are yours?