Measure progress on work with time tracking
5 min
Intermediate
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Configure time tracking settings
- Explain how Jira calculates time tracking metrics
Track time in Jira
If your team uses time to estimate or measure their work, you can use time tracking on individual work items. This provides visibility into the progress made on each work item and how much is still to be completed.
Time tracking also enables you to understand how accurate your estimates are, if your team uses time to estimate work for each sprint. You can see how long different work items take on average, understand how work is balanced across your team, and make informed decisions while planning what to work on next.
👇 Here’s what time tracking looks like on a work item.
You can also review tracked time across your space using the Time Tracking report. It shows what your team’s progress is as well as the accuracy of their estimates.
Configure time tracking
To configure time tracking for a company-managed board:
- Open your board.
- Next to the board name, select More actions (represented by •••), then Board settings.
- In the sidebar, select Estimation.
- Next to Time tracking, select the slider to enable it.
Space admins need to configure time tracking for their boards and spaces. Board admins can’t access this feature.
To configure time tracking for a team-managed board:
- In the sidebar, next to your space name, select More actions (represented by ···), then Space settings.
- In the sidebar, select Features.
- For the Estimation feature, select the slider to enable it.
- Select the Time estimation statistic for the feature.
To use time tracking, your Jira admin needs to have enabled it. Your space admin also needs to make time tracking fields visible on your work items. If you don’t see time tracking options, contact these admins.
How is time tracking calculated?
When you enable time tracking, Jira tracks progress by subtracting the value in the Time spent field from the value of the Original estimate.
Your team members will fill out both of these fields. Users can set an original estimate for how long they think the work item will take to complete. Then, they can log individual entries of minutes or hours of work as they make progress. Jira combines these work entries to calculate time spent. You can see the work already logged and the estimated time remaining for each work item.
If a work item takes longer than expected to complete, you can log more time than the Original estimate.
👉 For example: Let’s say your Original estimate was eight hours. You can still log 10 hours of work on that work item.
👇Here’s what it looks like when you log more work than your original estimate.
You can also use one of many time tracking apps available in the Atlassian Marketplace. Work with your Jira admin to manage apps.
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next lesson
Explore how estimation statistics affect Jira reports
- Improve your estimation with reports
- How estimation affects reports