What it JIRA counting as a "day" in Time Tracking?

[Katrina Greenberg]

I'm trying to break down the time tracking on some tickets into hours and the way JIRA has summarized the hours is very confusing. 

I assumed that 1 day would be equal to 8 hours, but on this one ticket the time is being reported as "4d16h logged."

Why wouldn't that be 6d instead? If it is counting the days as 24 hours, 96 hours + 16 hours seems way too long and I'm sure that was not the time logged for this ticket.

What is a "day" increment supposed to mean in hours?

[Brant Schroeder · Accepted solution]

@Katrina Greenberg By default it is set to 8h.  You can check what your settings are by going to Settings -> Issues -> Issues Features > Time Tracking

Here you can see what the global settings are and make adjustments as needed.  You need to be a Jira admin to access these settings.

[Katrina Greenberg]

Thanks, Brant! Then why on earth is it showing a time of 4d16h? Why not 6d? Or even 5d8h in case it wants to be extra clear that the days are exactly 6 days and the last 8 hours are exact and not a rounding?

Thanks!

[Brant Schroeder]

@Katrina Greenberg Were you able to see what your instance is set at?

[Katrina Greenberg]

I can't since I'm not an admin. Waiting for a response, but I have a feelings it's the defaults.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

It depends on what you have set in admin -> time tracking.   That's a global setting, but it does default to an 8 hour day, 5 days a week.

[Chris Rossi · Accepted solution]

Is there a feature request somewhere to allow us lowly non-administrators to be able to see what this has been set to?

I'm using a client's Jira instance and I need to add 16.5hrs to an existing ticket estimate, but the current estimate is showing as 4d 30m, not hours. Most of our clients have 6hrs/day. So I was about to make it 24.5 + 16.5hrs = 41hrs.

But that's incorrect. It turns out this client is actually set to 8hrs/day. So the original estimate wasn't 24.5hrs, it was 32.5hrs, so the updated estimate should actually be 49hrs.

In the end I used the REST API to grab this info by navigating to:

https://(instance).atlassian.net/rest/api/2/issue/ABC-123

which gave me:

originalEstimateSeconds: 117000

I used this to work out that 4d was actually 32hrs, not 24 hrs.

So basically what should have taken 10 seconds took me 15 minutes. You need to make this easier on us, not all of us are Jira administrators.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

There is a request somewhere, but it's not one I'm watching or bookmarked.  I'm usually the admin, so I can go look it up and get asked to explain it too.

There is a cheap trick for end-users - edit an issue or worklog repeatedly until you get a match.  Change the entry to 5h, look at the issue again, change it to 6h, look again, 7h, re-look and so on.  When it displays 1d instead of the number of hours you've entered, you've found the answer.  You may want to repeat that for 4d, 5d, 6d, although it's not common for people to use weeks that are not 5 days.

Bear in mind this is (currently) a global setting, so once you know it for one issue, you'll find it's the same for all projects.

[Chris Rossi]

The problem is that our users can't be expected to do the "cheap trick" (or even the API call I posted) every time they switch between different clients (each has their own Jira instance).

All we really need from Jira is that if you hover over the estimate in days, it should show you the estimate in hours. 

Here's a mockup:

(or even "13.52h" would be fine). Ideally this hover would be available on every time field which is displayed in days, including the time tracking (hours logged and remaining).

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'm afraid your best option at the moment is to document it for each client and get your users to look it up for each one when they need to know.

I'd also go through https://support.atlassian.com/contact to raise an improvement.