Working out time spent without detailed time tracking?

Question

I would like to be able to report on time spent on issue type or issue category without burdening developers with full time tracking.

For example, I may create a field on issues where you select whether it is a new feature, feature iteration, or production fix. From this I should be able to see what proportion of story points are attributed to each category. But I can't attribute time to those categories without getting the developers to log time spent... which seems like overkill.

What I'd like is a way of recording the man days in a sprint. Then I could easily calculate the proportion of man days gets spent on each category. But is anything like this possible?

Any help much appreciated!

John

John Cross_2zn8o3 · Answer

Thanks! I will take a look now...

John Cross_2zn8o3 · Answer

It will probably help if I explain the 'why?'

I am not really interested in tracking time in detail but I would like to know what proportion of time is spent on what type of work. For example, if a team is spending half its time working on live incidents then that is something I would like to know so that we can look at how we can improve that.

Say I had a sprint with 10 issues - 2 production fixes, 4 iterations of existing functionality, 4 new features - and each issue has a story point value against it - 4 SP of production fixes, 6 SP of iterations and 10 SP of new functionality. From that I could see that the weighting of work was roughly:

20% production fixes
30% iterations of existing functionality
50% new features

But the number of man-days per sprint will vary depending on holidays, sickness etc. If I could save the number of man-days against the sprint I could then work out the approx number of hours/days got spent on each type of work in that sprint.

And, come end of year, I could show the total time and therefore cost of each type of work which would prove very useful in several ways, not least when working out R&D tax credits.

Richard White _TechTime_ · Answer

Hi John,

We make a marketplace app called EasyTime, which is meant to solve the same problem (not wanting to waste developer time / effort on manual time tracking - which is usually not accurate)

However, our solution is completely different from what I think you are asking for and I am just curious for a little more detail on how you think it would work.

Am I right in understanding you are after something that divides the total time in a sprint evenly between issues? For example, if you are running two-week sprints and a developer has ten tasks, then to log 8 hours on each task? I don't quite see how this could possibly give an accurate result?

For contrast, our solution works simply by logging time, whenever a developer views an issue for an extended period of time, comments on the issue, or closes the issue - and seems to give a good starting point.