What is the best way to capture total number of hours spent on a project in Jira?

Question

Management wants to know how much dev effort (in hours) was spent on a project after it's completed to see ROI and they want to pull this information from Jira. How can this be done?

The team currently uses story points and there's no estimation vs actual time spent to complete a task.

What is the best solution for this?

vildana_ermaya · Answer

@Kian Stack Mumo Systems

When you ask are they actually logging time as in are they using the time tracking field? If so, then no they are not. They are just using story points and updating them when the task is marked done.

Sounds like if we did start using the time tracking field in the issue log there would be data in the Time Spent column, correct?

The second part regarding exporting, there's no way currently in Jira to get the total hours spent other than the manual workaround?

Thank you!

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @vildana_ermaya

How much work in progress (WIP) does your team have?  Specifically, do you work on one/few or lots of projects at once?

If it is one/few projects, please consider the least expensive, and yet accurate, solution to determine the Effort Hours = capacity x time duration:

* Determine how much capacity your team has: number of people x work hours/day
* Determine when a project started and ended (from start/end dates of relevant issues in Jira)
* Multiply the two values to get Effort Hours

Best regards,

Bill

Kian Stack Mumo Systems · Answer

Are they actually logging time on the issues within Jira?

If so, you should be able to perform a search for the tickets in Jira which were a part of the project.

Once you have the JQL for the tickets you want, switch the list view

On the right hand side, click on "Columns" and add "Time Spent". You can then export the tickets in Microsoft excel to sum up the time. The excel file will export with the time in seconds, so divide by 3600 to get total number of hours.