In this article, we will discuss how Jira, Toggl and the Jira Timesheet Report and Portlet Plugin have satisfied our needs of a time tracking mechanism highly integrated to our project management platform.

Time Tracking with Jira Issues

Jira - Issue and project tracking

In our previous article about project management (Comparison of Project Management Software), we reviewed five potential project management software and ended up choosing the excellent Pivotal Tracker.  At the time, we were looking for an affordable hosted project management solution and Jira, not offering such an option, was left out of the review.

Unfortunately, Pivotal Tracker did not (and still doesn’t) offer a good time tracking solution and we quickly realized that we needed this feature to organize our efforts internally and to justify our invoices.  Following the advice of Felix Martineau from TechSolCom, we went back to the comparison board and found out about Atlassian “Get Started for 10$” pricing option.  We urge software startups to evaluate this enterprise grade project management solution.

Jira time tracking process is highly integrated .  When you create an issue, you assign it an estimate of the total time required.  The dashboard shows you how many hours remain before all the issues of a given versions are finished.  At the end of the day, you fill the “work log” for each issue you worked on.  At this point, you either re-estimate the remaining hours, or just consume them from you initial estimation.

Now, you have associated accurate time estimates and consumptions to your Jira issues (bugs, features, tasks, and improvements), you can generate a bunch of useful reports.

As good as it is, we still had two problems with the default time tracking in Jira:

1. We wanted to give a monthly report to our clients and none of the available reports where in a format we liked
2. We had to manually calculate the time spent on each issue and it quickly became a nightmare

NB: Time tracking in Jira comes with the default installation but needs to be activated (see the official documentation).

Jira Timesheet Report and Portlet Plugin

Enables additional time tracking

There is an impressive amount of plugins available for Atlassian’s many tools (find them all at the Plugin Exchange page). To solve our “time reports to clients” problem, we went ahead and installed the Jira Timesheet Report and Portlet Plugin. This simple plugin gave us two new Time Tracking reports: The Pivot Project Report and the User Timesheet Report. The first one gives you a summary of who worked on a project and how much time total they have spent on individual issues for a given period. The second one gives a more detailed view of the work of a single employee, showing you the time spent on issues on a day to day basis for the entire period given.

Using these reports, we now have a solid representation of the work we do each month.  At the end of a period, we export the report in Excel format which we append to our invoices.  Our clients really appreciate the level of details it provides.

Toggl – Tracking Time on a Day to Day Basis

Time tracking that works.

From our experience, many software developers (including us) suffer from an attention deficit disorder.  We spend 12 minutes on a task, and then toggle to another one.  We found Toggl to be exceptionnaly good at capturing our hourly efforts despite our attention shifts.  All you need to do is create a new task, give it a meaningful name (we use the ID of the Jira issue I’ll be working on) and press the big button to start logging your time. If you create a new task and start working on it, Toggl will automatically stops the tracking of your previous active task and switch to this new one.  At the end of each week, we sync Jira worklogs with Toggl’s timesheet.

We appreciate Toggl for its extreme simplicity. Don’t get us wrong here, it is packed with much more than simple time tracking (to name a few: it can differentiate between billable and non-billable work, assign tasks to different projects and/or clients, share information between multiple users and generate very nice reports) but it is built in a way that let you use only what you need and for us, that is simple time tracking. Regardless of how many features you plan on using, we have noticed an interesting side-effect to logging your work in Toggl: by forcing you to define what you will be working on next (the task name) and by accurately tracking the time you spend on it, this little application is great at helping people focus on their current task.

For comparison sake, we had tried Klok prior to Toggl but we felt it was too complicated for our needs and lacked the small form factor and easy interface of its competitor. Also, while writing this article, we’ve stumbled upon another Jira plugin that seems to be doing something similar to Toggl but with a stronger integration into Jira (Aide de Worklog (time tracking)). We have yet to test it but if you have please give us some feedback in the comment section of the article.

Summary

For the past months, Koneka has been successfully keeping track of the time spent on our different projects in Jira with the help of the Toggl time tracking tool and the Jira Timesheet Report and Portlet Plugin. Together, these three tools have made our life easier, our clients happier and our project management better.

In prevision of upcomming contracts, we decided to take a step back, compare available Project Management Software and see if we could find one that better fits our needs. This entry is a small wrap up of our observations, thoughts and conclusions on the solutions we have considered.

Testing the Project Management Software

While there is an enormous amount of Project Management Software out there, we could only afford to evaluate a few of them. Considering the current size of the company, we decided to stick with the smaller players in order to reduce the cost. We also tried to focus on hosted solutions to avoid having to deal with server setup and maintenance. For these two reasons, Axosoft OnTime and Atlassian Jira were discarded.

Take note that the Project Management Software are listed in order of preference, starting with the one we preferred.

Pivotal Tracker

Pivotal Tracker - Free Lightweight Agile Project Management & Team Collaboration

Pivotal Tracker is missing a some of the “new” features we were looking for. Nevertheless, it has been a strong asset in our software development process, is completely free and it has a great user interface.

It is interesting to note that Pivotal Labs just released the Pivotal Tracker API v3.  This new API allows the use of source control post commit hooks making it possible to link SVN commits to tickets.  The low score in that category comes from the fact that you have to implement it yourself for now.

FogBugz

FogBugz - Bring Your Project Into Focus

FogBugz turned out to be a strong contestant during our searches. Its smooth interface, strong time tracking features and good support for multiple simultaneous projects through global milestones really shinned. Their “Evidence-Based Scheduling” reports were also an interesting addition.

Agile development integration was minimal with only a poorly integrated Kanban board available through a plugin. The lack of SVN hosting is disappointing considering the price scheme they use but they were nice enough to offer hook scripts that you can add to your own repository for easy integration and they also offer the possibility to enfore this feature through Tortoise SVN.

Code Spaces

Code Spaces - Project Management and Source Code Hosting for Professional Development Teams

Code Spaces looks great but it was lacking some basic features we came to expect from project management software after reviewing the other options (namely SVN commit cannot link automatically and work items cannot be modified in batch). In addition, Code Spaces offers time tracking features for individual work items but, as far as I know, you don’t have any way to use that information to generate reports or charts.

On the plus side, its card wall was nicely integrated and pleasant to use. It could be improved through the addition of more information on the “cards” (I could use visible information about “Assigned To”, “Work Item Type” and “Work Item Status”) and a velocity system but it was still the second best option we’ve seen after Pivotal Tracker.

I feel it’s also important to mention the Code Spaces “Portal” included with your account that easily allow Clients to submit issues or track projects from a nice customizable web page linked directly to your Code Spaces account.

Unfuddle

Unfuddle - Software Project Management Git and Subversion Hosting

Unfuddle was the Project Management Solution we spent the less time in. The main reason for that is the complete lack of agile development tools in it. Their trial version also limited the amount of active projects to one (which is why we could not test support for multiple projects) and did not have the time tracking module.

Despite all that, I can say unfuddle seemed to be a strong option for non-agile oriented groups with a well organised and good looking UI, good SVN integration and a versatile User Permissions control (useful to give a limited access to client for example).

Assembla

Assembla was a strong contestant feature-wise and we considered it for a while but in the end I just couldn’t get along with its bland and unintuitive interface. It has an easy to use SVN Commit hook system through special commands integrated in the commit comment (i.e. “close #3″ to close a ticket).

Their Agile Planner suffered from the UI problem and was somewhat unintuitive to me (No backlog?). I’m not even sure we would have used it had we chosen Assembla as our Project Management Software.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, none of the Project Management Solutions we looked at were completely satisfying to us. Like we mentioned earlier, FogBugz ended up being our top contender but the lack of Hosted SVN, poor agile development integration and potentially high price in the long term turned us down.

For now, we feel we are better off sticking with Pivotal Tracker (adding functionalities through their new API v3 if needed). It is our tried and true approach and it has given us great results in the past.

Useful links

Wikipedia Chart comparing popular Project Management Software

Comparison of project management software on Wikipedia

Project Management Software we have heard of but not evaluated

Axosoft OnTime

Atlassian Jira

Microsoft Project

TargetProcess

Koneka has been involved in the development of Edilex’ Website since February 2009 during which we have:

• Positioned Edilex Website in the top 3 search results in Google for more than 100 relevant keywords
• Developed an online presence for their Learning Center “The meeting point of legal and business minds”;
• Migrated their edilexpress articles to a Wordpress blog platform;

Koneka shares Edilex’ long-term vision that the standardization of the best legal practices through the development of dedicated technological tools will revolutionized business processes.  This partnership seals our intention to join state-of-the-art software development with 25 years of legal structural design.

From word of mouth to the Internet

Traditionally, lawyers have developed their market through networking and word of mouth.  In recent times, more and more have embarked on the Internet fast-paced wagon.  Many have expressed to Koneka their interest in increasing their online presence.  They asked: “How can my Website rank well on Google?”  But before answering that question, let’ see why it’s a good publicity to appear early in search results.

Why should you appear in top 3 results of search engines

Many research document where people click on Google. They conclude that 85% of the visitors will click on one of the first 3 organic results. Google is extremely good at putting meaningful links in there.

Another way to look at is by looking at the eye-pattern heat-map below.  You will notice that people gaze significantly more at the first 3 results.  Their interest is rapidly declining as we go down the list.

In short: you must strive to reach this search podium!

Google Eye Gaze Heat-Map

Search Engine Optimization for dummies

In this section, I will summarize 4 elements I welcome you to consider when building up your website.  If you work with web design firms, make sure they are aware of those elements, because you may otherwise end-up in the abyss of Google’s result.  It can be frustrating after having spent thousands revamping your Website look.

1. Identify Keywords

Before writing your first line, consider what are the best keywords describing what it is you want to say.  It will be very hard to score well on too many queries, so focus on 20-30 key concepts.  Also, think hard about what differentiate your offer from your competitor. For instance, it will be hard to rank well on “business attorneys”.  By adding distinguishing elements in your keyword list, like geographic locations “business attorneys Ottawa”, you have a better shot at the first 3 spots!

2. Place those keyword appropriately

Without going too much into technical detail, you can hint Google about what are the most important sentences on your page.  Let’s take this blog post as an example.

The top title is very important. This text is used by Google to present your page to searchers.  The keywords you use in there (<title> tag) have more weight than anything else on your page.  The second most significant identifier is your main title (<h1> tag).  Finally, Google makes its mind on the overall keyword distribution, so be careful to spread your top 20 keywords several times throughout the article.

As a side note, be aware that Google won’t see the keywords in rich media files like Flash movies.  Lawyers are incredible scribes, so it would be unfortunate that your content remains hidden to the world.   Again, make sure you web developers restrain themselves from going down the flashy road.

3. Appeal your target audience

If you optimized your site for “business attorneys in Ottawa”, make sure your content is meaningful to people searching those terms.  Google is pretty smart.  It knows how long visitors stay on your Website.  If it finds out that people spent an average of 5 seconds on your page, it will conclude that your content is finally not worthy of ranking well for those terms.  Google Analytics refers to this measure as “bounce rate”.

4. Build incoming links

This is the bread-and-butter of search engine optimization. Each incoming link to your site cast a vote to Google’s PageRank algorithm.  PageRank, by the way, is the technology developed by Google’s founder Larry Page during his studies at Stanford.  The more votes you have, the better your rank.  The higher you rank, the more voting power your Website has.  Furthermore, PageRank analyses the correlation between your Website content and the referring page.  If the Department of Justice of Canada refers to your site “Ottawa’s business attorneys .com”, be assured is will be taken into consideration.  You can always do strategic link exchange with partners in a similar field.

Conclusion

In conclusion, throughout the entire Web design process, always keep in mind that you want to be found by Google’ spiders.  Also, make sure that your Web designer has some basic knowledge of search-engine optimization.  Feel free to contact us to obtain more information!

Interesting links:

A company doing SEO for lawyers: http://www.stemlegal.com/
SEO gurus (for tech savvy): http://www.seomoz.com

This blog will be about the path I chose to unite two passions: software development and business.  Oddly enough, those passions brought me to the legal industry.  I figured that business contracts are, in the end, human-readable code.  Isn’t a contract a series of instructions to be executed by a legal entity?

So, if you are a software developer, a legal practitioner or an entrepreneur sharing our interest in business intelligence, stay tuned!