Efficient Time Tracking with Jira Project Management Tools

One important aspect of project management is time management: predicting how long things will take to produce accurate estimations and tracking how long they actually took for billing purposes.  Accurately guessing the required time to accomplish a task requires a good dose of both skill and experience.  On the other hand, figuring out how much time was spent on a project is mostly a matter of having the right tools and ensuring the people in your business use them.

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.