Can you log work without an issue in JIRA

[dylan_millikin]

Hello,

Is it possible to log work in JIRA without an associated issue?

I'm asking because we use Jira to log time spent on our projects and then create monthly summaries to see if we've been efficient or not (financialy). However the tasks we accomplish on these projects aren't always things we can/want to put in a sprint. Such as unexpected meetings (or simply meetings), Time spent reviewing/merging, and so forth.

We would really like to log this time somewhere but are at a loss as to how to proceed. Even an add-on would suffice

Thanks in advance

[Mehmet Kazgan · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Everything in JIRA is stored with reference to a ticket. So, I don't believe you can store data in JIRA without associating it to a ticket.

A way to that would be:

1. Creating one parent task/type call it Time logging issue type
2. Enabling subtasks
3. Creating a subtask field configuration with summary, reporter fields
4. Associating the sub tasks to a single step workflow
5. Creating subtasks with time anytime logging time.
6. Configuring your board to display certain statuses except time logging steps/statuses

Hope that helps.

Mehmet

[dylan_millikin]

That sounds like it could work great. But does this imply that I add the task to a sprint? Or can I simply let it sit in my backlog?

[Mehmet Kazgan]

I think you should be able to let it sit in your backlog.

[dylan_millikin]

I'll mark this as resolving my issue, I used the same principle but changed it slightly. We'll see if it works out. We mostly use the new Agile board so here's what I did instead:

1. Created a Time logging issue type and associated it to a new screen.
2. Assigned the time logging issue type to a single step workflow going straight to "closed"
3. Created an epic named "Time logging"

The epic is always open. When I create a time logging issue type I assign it to the epic. The issue will go straight to closed and not appear in the backlog.

[Johannes Seyfried]

There are a lot of approaches coping with this requirement. If you'd like to track all time spent in JIRA then a plugin like Tempo Timesheets will meet your requirements because there you could solve this problem by

a) defining several attributes to a worklog (billable, nonbillable, ...)

b) using internal issues

and maybe a lot more ways. If you've like to do a finegranular controlling on your timetracking I can recommend that way.

If you'd like to keep it simple just add one additional JIRA project for all efforts not billed to customers with e.g. one task per type (meetings, reviews,...) or one task per project.

[dylan_millikin]

Thanks, we're looking into tempo for other purposes. So I will defenitely look into this.