Can you or should you use Time Tasks in Sprints

Alex Harrison May 11, 2021

I am relatively new to sprints and working in a bit of a hybrid Agile/Waterfall method.

A colleague wants to include "Time Tasks" in the sprint but I am not sure if this is how Time Tasks should be used.  There is nothing stopping us adding it to the sprint but just wondering if there is any reason that you would not.  Does it have any impact on reporting for example.

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Bill Sheboy
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May 11, 2021

Hi @Alex Harrison 

What do you and your colleague mean by "time tasks"?  Do you mean to record the estimates in time units (e.g. hours)?

And are you using Team-managed (next-gen) or Company-managed (classic) projects for your team?

Teams work in different ways, including estimation, and so Jira supports estimation with: story points, time, both, or neither for Company-managed projects.  For Team-managed, Jira currently only supports estimation by story points or nothing.  For both project types, the reporting adjusts based upon the type of estimation you have selected.  (For Kanban teams, there is still some work to do from Atlassian to better support count-only estimation.)

I recommend having a chat with your team about why and how you used estimation, of any form, and that will help you decide what features of Jira to use to support that.

Best regards,

Bill

Alex Harrison May 11, 2021

We are using Company-Managed projects.  When I say "Time Task" this is the issuetype (eg stories, Subtask, Tasks, Time-tasks).

Normally I use Time Task for logging time to ad-hoc meetings.

We are in our infancy on estimation but currently we use both Story Points and Estimated time) but not really getting much reporting from it.

Bill Sheboy
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May 11, 2021

Ah; thanks for clarifying!

IMHO, use of such tracking depends upon the company culture, practices, and task-purpose.  For some examples:

  • If I am having an ad-hoc meeting related to the work I am doing on a feature, that is part of the feature's work.  I would not see a need for a separate "task" for doing the work.  I find there is always uncertainty in estimation and work-definition, so missing a task here-or-there isn't a big deal...as long as I learn from it for future planning, and account for it in forecasting.  Please note: scale is key here.  If we are having a multi-day story mapping workshop, I'd probably plan for that task work.
  • If a team member on an agile team wants to start task tracking for the daily scrum (stand-up), sprint planning, the sprint review, and the retrospective, it is probably time to pause for some learning as a team about agile events and their purpose to transparency, inspection, and adaptation...rather than tracking them as "meetings".
  • If working in a company/culture where all of our time is accounted for to indicate billable and non-billable, then it may be appropriate to record whatever is needed to support that tracking.
  • Etc.
Alex Harrison May 12, 2021

Thanks - yes we definitely need to decide more about how we want to track and report our time within sprints and what is included as sprint work and what is "BAU" eg non sprint.  Thanks 

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