How to calculate actual development time in Jira

[Keith Grimes]

New user to Jira and need help doing what I thought would be really simple. I have a "Dev Time Estimate" field in which I enter 8h (8 hours). 

Then I click on the Start Development button -- which in my mind would start a timer that would be used to calculate actual development time from that moment forward.

After clicking on the Start Development button, another button appears called Calculate Time Estimate. After clicking on this button, it's not clear to me what it's doing? 

Finally, after (say) 4 hours of work has passed on this ticket, I click the Stop Development button -- expecting this to stop the same timer mentioned above, and would calculate actual development time of 4 hours. But that is not happening. The Logged field under Time Estimate stays at 0 hours.

Am I using these features incorrectly? Is my thinking/expectation incorrect? Please advise.

As I said, I am a new user and am just looking for basic functionality at this point.

Thank you very much.

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

@Keith Grimes welcome to the Community! OOTB Jira doesn't do any any time recording. It may be that your instance has some addon that would do this but I cannot say from where I sit. Reading your post here I see "Start Development" which I would assume is simply a transition from "To Do" to "In Progress" or similar statuses. That in and of itself does not equate to any time recording action. Now, you also mention "Calculate Time Estimate" button. I'm not familiar w/ this as any default but I do see you are on server so maybe it is. However, I suspect it is either a custom field added by you admin or there is an addon that you admin installed. I would chat w/ your admin to understand what these buttons are supposed to do. Again, I suspect they are mostly for transitioning an issue thru the workflow. You can monitor the status each time you click them.

[Keith Grimes]

Thanks very much, Jack. I suspected that what you said was the case. I am trying to record workflow. I appreciate your response.

So, to summarize I think what you are saying, Jira in and of itself does not offer a means of "automatically" calculating the amount of time a ticket spends in development workflow. 

I will pass this on to my boss.