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Would be nice to be able to log time on a story card.
It would be nice to be able to log hours on specific cards and have a report to show weekly what tasks were done and the hours logged.
Official
Response
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We've made it so that Tracker's time keeping functionality can be enabled on a per-account level by account owners and admins. To turn on time keeping, go to your Account settings, via the Account Accounts link in the top right, and check the 'Time Tracking' checkbox option.
Once enabled, all members of projects in the given account should see a time link in the top right corner, where they can enter time shifts in terms of # of hours, by date and project.
Account owners and administrators can add additional time enterers on the Account Members Page (Account -> Members). Time enterers are those who can enter time on the account. Time Keepers are those who can administer time on the account and view all time data associated to projects on the given account. Time enterers on the account will be able to enter time against any project associated to this account.
Tracker's time keeping functionality is primarily intended for our development teams to keep track of how many hours they've spent on a given client project, by day, for client billing purposes. We may revisit and enhance this feature in the future, based on feedback, but it's also possible that Tracker's time keeping will be replaced by an integration with an external time keeping / management system instead.
Promoted
Responses
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4We are happy to introduce integration Pivotal Tracker with Time&Tracking software. This integration will allow you log time on a story card with Time&Tracking service.
How to start?
1. Create an account at http://www.timeandtracking.com
2. Log in to T&T
3. Go to Settings->Add-ons and put your API Token
4. It will automatically synchronize stories and you will be able to track time on a story card easily
Any feedback is very welcome.
T&T is free for a single user. -
3@snaufer, what's Scrum got to do with being able to bill someone?
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13Like many other posters, I hate the practice of estimating how many hours a story or task will take. I also question the value of adding an "estimated hours" field to Pivotal stories. However, the ability to log actual hours against a story or task would be extremely valuable not only as a tracking tool but as a learning tool. My team can review tasks after completion and say, "Wow, we assigned that story 2 effort-points, but spent almost 50 hours on it; and that story was 8 effort-points but only took 4 hours; next time we have stories similar to these we will have a better guess about what kind of effort they will really require."
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I am looking for a project management time tracker application and was referred to Pivotal. So far I like what I see but I need to track time spent on each story. If you guys could add this it would be sweet!
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I’m
glad that pivotal tracker came into my life...
1I'll second that. It would be great to be able to enter the projected time to complete a story (for the planning stages and prioritization of tasks) and then the actual time spent on it (for billing purposes). -
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2Just the ability to log the time against the story is enough for me. Then I will have a true one-stop for my project management and time reporting.
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We're thinking about time management functionality in Tracker. How important would it be to tie time against specific stories?
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I think this would be quite toxic for Tracker. The whole promise of agile turns on estimations over time, which can then be evaluated in terms of trends in over- or under-delivering planned iterations. Tracking individual stories by time would allow PMs to specifically not engage in the agile process, and use Tracker like any other brain-dead software management tool.
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Scott's assessment is bang-on. I was really surprised to see that Tracker didn't support the tracking of "hours remaining" on tasks and does not create a time burndown chart. To me those are critical tools that allow the team to visualize their progress toward their committed sprint goals.
I don't need time tracking for billing, but I understand that others do and to answer Steven Ringo's question what that has to do with Scrum is that many teams utilising scrum operate in an environment where client billing is necessary. -
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I’m
excited
I like to see time report (effort report) as a tool for comparing estimate precision. As a scrum master, I also would like to have a todo option so that developers could report the effort and the time they thing that a specific backlog item will take till end.
I know that daily scrum meeting will also do it, but as soon we have that information, the better.
I do not believe that this kind of tools should be used for billing purposes, since typically there are several task that are also billed that usually team do not add to tracker, such as reunions, brain storming, etc. In my team we only log working time in project manager software, but I believe that non working time should also be billed (coffee break, e-mail replies, W.C., etc) since they are normal routines and after all the developer is 100% assigned to client project. -
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13Like many other posters, I hate the practice of estimating how many hours a story or task will take. I also question the value of adding an "estimated hours" field to Pivotal stories. However, the ability to log actual hours against a story or task would be extremely valuable not only as a tracking tool but as a learning tool. My team can review tasks after completion and say, "Wow, we assigned that story 2 effort-points, but spent almost 50 hours on it; and that story was 8 effort-points but only took 4 hours; next time we have stories similar to these we will have a better guess about what kind of effort they will really require."
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I’m
happy if this gets implemented into tracker
2I agree with you. The idea is to learn from past implemented stories by knowing how many points were assigned to them and how much effort was really required in order to improve the estimations.
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Beign able to track time spent against stories and chores would be great. Just a field for "number of hours" and some basic reporting would be enough. It allows you to answer things like:
- How good are my estimates (points + velocity vs. time)
- How much time are my team spending on stories (total story time vs. total team time)
- How much time is 'wasted' on chores
- How much time is not accounted for
Martin -
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1I need to log time purely for invoicing purposes, as I am a freelancer
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That is a horrible idea. At least if you are a using Scrum
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3@snaufer, what's Scrum got to do with being able to bill someone?
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I'm evaluating PivotalTracker for use in a long duration project (about 1 year). Since it's a somewhat big project, a "traditional" project management also exists. It would be really useful to centralize the R&D team (about 5 - 6 elements) on Tracker and then export the real effort (timelog) to the project manager / project coordinator .... Any prediction on when this could be available? If at all? Thanks for the killer app! ;)
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I’m
frustrated that I have to track time in the first place, but if it has to be done, I'd rather use PT!
1Just to add to the various voices... Sometimes, we do have to track time spent on projects (in some detail) due to external pressures. Occasionally it's clients (though I tend to avoid the kind of clients who want that granular a level of time keeping).
The big one for me is that, if we receive funding from a particular Scottish Government agency (say, an innovation grant) we're required to keep detailed time records in order to draw down on that money. Rather than the additional burden of having a separate time sheet application (we've tried, and failed miserably, with a couple) it would be awesome to keep it all in Pivotal.
Boris also makes a strong argument in that it provides an easy-to-grasp positive feedback loop for estimating. -
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2Maybe Tracker can just track time automatically? It would be useful to see how long stories lasted (starting when they were added, ending when they were delivered). Wouldn't this be very relevant for calculating velocity?
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It's now one year since this request came up, but still no feedback or indication off thats this is a planned feature!?
API integrations stuff is nice to have, but almost useless if the baseline is missing needed funtionality. Which this is for our team. We need time tracking to generate report for billing our customers, and to keep track on what we and our developers are spending our time on. -
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EMPLOYEE
2Tracker does have basic time functionality, we can enable it for your account by request. This feature allows keeping track of hours worked by day, by project. It is not tied to specific stories, though, and at the moment we do not have plans to add story-level time keeping/reporting.
Velocity calculation is based solely on the number of points accepted per iteration.- view 3 more comments
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Dan, thanks for sharing the additional time tracker capability, would like add my vote for you to consider extending for adding to stories though. 'Estimates' would also be nice but not as essential as 'Actuals', not everyone sticks religiously to a specific methodology.
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It's nice that you guys added something, but without story-level time tracking it's not useful to day-to-day. This thread is fairly old, is there any movement on this feature?
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Many companies that use subcontractors would benefit from timekeeping per Story.
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This would also be very useful for summing up the time spent on research projects at the end of the year for tax purposes.
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well! its good to see that you are well aware of the value of time management.
because it keeps the people aside from the crowd. same efforts and resources and same practice but better time management skilled peoples also top.
circus management is one of the best example of that. -
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I’m
this makes me feel very sad
It's a shame that this still isn't in place. When a client approaches me and asks me how long a piece of work will take I have no way of knowing and therefore cannot replace my current excel method with Pivotal Tracker. -
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We've made it so that Tracker's time keeping functionality can be enabled on a per-account level by account owners and admins. To turn on time keeping, go to your Account settings, via the Account Accounts link in the top right, and check the 'Time Tracking' checkbox option.
Once enabled, all members of projects in the given account should see a time link in the top right corner, where they can enter time shifts in terms of # of hours, by date and project.
Account owners and administrators can add additional time enterers on the Account Members Page (Account -> Members). Time enterers are those who can enter time on the account. Time Keepers are those who can administer time on the account and view all time data associated to projects on the given account. Time enterers on the account will be able to enter time against any project associated to this account.
Tracker's time keeping functionality is primarily intended for our development teams to keep track of how many hours they've spent on a given client project, by day, for client billing purposes. We may revisit and enhance this feature in the future, based on feedback, but it's also possible that Tracker's time keeping will be replaced by an integration with an external time keeping / management system instead. -
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this should be updated to "this is done", right? ;)
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Please don't mark this as done! Or please make a new discussion on the same topic. We need to have some solution for time tracking on a Story. The solution can be a feature of pivotal tracker or a 3rd party integration but our organization needs to have this feature for accounting purposes. It's very important because we need to track Capital Improvements vs Maintenance Expenses. If a solution exists, please let me know.
Thanks!
PaulL -
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1This is really disappointing. Pivotal - you're interesting. But you also enforce philosophies of your own design. We don't need that, and it's really against the whole idea of agile workflows.
All we need is one little field to record time spent by a person on a story. Better, the ability for individuals to log time against a story. I know that's adding another dimension to the data. But come on! This one is so obvious! If you rounded that out with an estimate of actual hours per iteration, release, or project (Hey, i don't even care which at this point) we could learn how accurate we are at estimating story complexity (hours should be about constant for a constant number of points per unit of time)
please? if not, how much risk is a vendor taking in adding this functionality via the APIs... given the possibility that you would just add your own stuff at some point?-
It is a common misunderstanding that story points can be mathematically converted to hours. Story points are estimated before starting on the task, hours can only be measured after. There is no way that you can estimate the hours it will take to solve a particular problem, so story points is a statistical way to overcome this.
Hour tracking per story is "old traditionalist thinking", please don't add it!!! Or add another level of payment plans (more expensive) for all project that use it ;-) or even invoice usage of the feature per hour usage ;-) -
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I’m
confident
This is the final feature that is truly missing from this product. Expected vs. Actual time spent on a story. With this many people asking for this feature for this long, there must be a reason it isn't being added. Has anyone heard the answer? -
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I'm sure this information could be achieved through a new reporting scheme. We need to know when members started and ended working on a story.
When would this option would be implemented? -
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I’m
sad
1My client requires that I log time (to the quarter-hour!) per story. I would love if, say, a Started story could also be Paused, and I could Start / Pause a story whenever I switch tasks. Then a story could accumulate hours. As-is, looks like I'll have to copy / paste stories' descriptions and URLs into a spreadsheet and track my time there. Boo. -
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Having both actuals and estimates on stories is very important for tracking, even in an extremely agile methodology. Just wanted to add my voice to this mix. -
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can I add time spent to a specific story in the story edit screen? it would be easier than entering in a time sheet style. We want to track time spent per story so we know how well we are estmating
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
time entry per story. -
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I’m
sad
1I tried, but sorry to say we have to abandon Tracker because we cannot track time per story (50 developers). Of course, we would also need to generate a report based on that time data. I'll keep watching this thread and hoping. It is the number one requested item right now, so I'll cross my fingers.
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2My current client capitalizes its software development costs. To do so, they need to know how much time was spent on the project. Having the ability to track time is a feature they would require to adopt pivotal for internal projects.
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allow users to enter hours spent on each story or task. This is a better method to track time for clients.
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
time entry field on story and tasks. -
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I’m
frustrated
1Adding a timer of estimated vs. actual time spent is the most vital thing in project management. This is done really well by Planbox.com (note: I don't work for them or anything) if Pivotal Tracker could just get this done it would be a game-changer in how we use it.
It is SHOCKING how different projections are vs actual time spent can be, and it makes estimating multiple weeks or months in advance a virtually futile task, knowing that it usually won't be correct. With a timer, you can tell in real time how fast things are going and have some real world metrics on your progress.
This would be vital and I'd love to see it. -
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I agree, this is critical. And if it seems to be controversial, just make it something you can turn on and off. For those that need it, it's very valuable. -
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I’m
really sad so many have not seen how bad this feature request is for your true value, just because many want it doesn't make it right
Please, don't add this! It would break the clean feature set of PivotalTracker!!!
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I'm evaluating PT and for me the lack of time tracking per story is a major weakness.
I don't see how adding it to PT damages the feature set in any way. You already have Start Stop buttons - just time it! The functionality needed is already so close it seems crazy to omit this feature. If you don't want to know - simply don't look at the time sheets!
It may be considered "old fashioned thinking", but unfortunately old skool is what pays the bills! I have clients who want an account of time spent on each feature or each day. I have contractors who want to bill me for their work on my stories.
Its obvious to me to do all this in PT. I certainly don't want to have to enter that information elsewhere and duplicate my workload.
Sorry but PT's current time tracking is virtually useless to me as it stands, I'd be better using Excel for that side of things! -
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I’m
happy
I would like to save my time shifts to a story in pivotal tracker. Might help to determine, if the estimation was correct.
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Save time shift to story, not only project. -
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It's a major feature missing in Pivotal and if it's not implemented we will have to switch to another product.
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This feature is really important. We need to know the cost of each feature, so we need to be able to track time in each story. We also need to track the original estimate vs total hours submitted.
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1I have done quite a lot of research on a good project management application.
But it seems a lot of them are incomplete packages. Or they are either bug/issue trackers or a todo's/tasks with or without time tracking.
Currently we use manymoon, but it's not suitable for bug tracking and plus they will be merging and become do.com, which is a pretty simple todo's with no time tracking.
I've looked at mavenlink which does nice time tracking and budgeting, but lacks in integration with a bug tracker. I also looked at lighthouse bug tracking but that was a bit too simplistic. AgileZen is also missing time tracking. ZOHO Projects solves some of these problems but I find their UX very difficult and complicated. Could be simpler. JIRA also seems like a complete package it has time tracking but it was missing time reports. It also has a pretty complicated and ugly UX.
Chiliproject/Redmine do a great job at integrating a lot of these things and does a whole bunch of other things, but It's still missing a few things IMO.
FogBugz does a great job at integrating all these things from what I can see, but for a small startup company their prices are a bit too high.
When comparing all these applications I can truly say that I like pivotal tracker the most. It's simple and easy to use and the agile methodology is awesome. For a small startup this is enough and does not need a full blown complicated bug tracker.
The only thing I miss is being able to log time on story cards. This way we can see that we have not spent too much time on a story/project, and give better estimates next time.
With a great report tab where you can filter by date, project, story (finished, accepted.. etc), this would truly be the best application. -
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I’m
happy with this solution
I know this is not how points are "supposed" to be assigned, but my system works well:
I use the Fibonacci scale. When creating a story, the points I assign are an upper estimate of the hours it will take to complete it. When completing the story, I change the points to reflect how much time the story actually took. I've enabled point tracking for bugs and chores as well.
Works great for me, and allows me to plan very well. If I need to get a measure of business value (ie., the original purpose of the point system) then I just look at the icons representing the story types and I get a good feeling of the mix. -
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I’m
happy
Hey Guys,
If anyone here is open to using Grindstone 2 to handle their time tracking then I would recommend using Grindstone Pivotal Sync as an integrated solution for tracking and submitting time related to Pivotal Tracker projects/stories. Grindstone 2 to is a robust time tracking desktop application that will allow you to select a story (imported from Pivotal Tracker) and click a start/stop button to track time for that particular story. Once you are ready to submit the tracked time to Pivotal Tracker you can run the Grindstone Pivotal Sync tool. This tool will update Grindstone 2 with the stories found in Pivotal Tracker and then submit any previously unsubmitted time as new shifts in Pivotal Tracker. The time submitted to Pivotal Tracker uses the story name as part of the description, which can later be used to determine the total time spent on a specific story. To calculate the total time spent on a story you will need to export the Pivotal Tracker timesheet to a csv file, open the file in Excel, sort by the description column, and then add the hours (using the sum function in Excel) for the story in question. Having said all that, Grindstone 2 can be found here, and Grindstone Pivotal Sync can be found here. Keep in mind that Grindstone Pivotal Sync is open source, written by yours truly on behalf of Mobile Accord, and can be customized to suite your needs. Below is the url for the GitHub repository:
https://github.com/mobileaccord/Grind...
Let me know if you have any questions or comments.
Thanks,
Adam -
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We might be able to work around this but time on stories would be very helpful to us.
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4We are happy to introduce integration Pivotal Tracker with Time&Tracking software. This integration will allow you log time on a story card with Time&Tracking service.
How to start?
1. Create an account at http://www.timeandtracking.com
2. Log in to T&T
3. Go to Settings->Add-ons and put your API Token
4. It will automatically synchronize stories and you will be able to track time on a story card easily
Any feedback is very welcome.
T&T is free for a single user. -
