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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.
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The company has not planned to implement this.
The best point from everyone
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Like 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."
4 people think
this is one of the best points
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Inappropriate?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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Inappropriate?I'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).
I’m glad that pivotal tracker came into my life...
1 person thinks
this is one of the best points
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Inappropriate?Just 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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Inappropriate?We're thinking about time management functionality in Tracker. How important would it be to tie time against specific stories?3 Comments Add a comment
This is one of the best points
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two aspects with regard to the time management:
1) Simply the ability to log/track time spent on the story for billing purpose and also for my management metrics;
2) Then, comes the planning aspect where the story can be broken down to the "task" level where engineers/scrum master will be able to tie to a time duration.
To me, the first one is more or less a must for project mgmt purpose and the second one, well, it's nice to have, in my opinion.
BTW, we are planning to write a Java app by integrating through your web services API to report the time. Did someone develop similar solution before and you can share?
- Rene -
Tracking time per task (in a per-story task list) would be valuable for helping teams improve. Agile estimation is decidedly two-tiered, and should probably stay that way.
Top tier - rough estimate of story "size" in points. Done quickly, ideally by consensus with fibbonaci (planning poker). These rough numbers aggregate to give per-sprint velocity data. Remember, they aren't _hours_ they are points. Since you can't track time spent in "points", you can't really reconcile these estimates. But that's ok, you don't need to.
Second tier - a story is decomposed into a set of execution tasks (update the UI, migrate the db, expose API, etc). These tasks are estimated in hours. The implementation team can record the time spent versus the time estimated. This allows them (with good reporting) to get better at estimating the time to do new tasks. That helps the team.
You could roll up the hours*tasks per story data and see how estimated (and actual) hours per story point play out - but that's really only useful for someone required to track "time spent" - it doesn't help with release-planning or execution, unless the data at the task level (which takes much longer to create) is a much better predictor of velocity (at the sprint level), than the story-estimates are. The detailed data, when rolled up, will only be a better predictor if the story estimates are (1) consistently wrong, and (2) erratically wrong - inconsistently high or low, and (3) there is not enough data in #2 that it will average out and look like #1 over time. When there isn't enough data, then the detailed-level data isn't going to really help much either.
At the end of the day - this feature (if implemented) only makes sense for task estimates, and then only for (1) project managers who have to track hours spent per "something" and (2) developers/testers who want to get better at estimating tasks. -
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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Inappropriate?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.
I’m excited
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Inappropriate?Like 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."
4 people think
this is one of the best points
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Inappropriate?I 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.
I’m happy if this gets implemented into tracker
2 people think
this is one of the best points
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Inappropriate?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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Inappropriate?That is a horrible idea. At least if you are a using Scrum
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Inappropriate?@snaufer, what's Scrum got to do with being able to bill someone?
1 person thinks
this is one of the best points
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Inappropriate?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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Inappropriate?Just 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.
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!
1 person thinks
this is one of the best points
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Inappropriate?Maybe 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?
1 person thinks
this is one of the best points
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Inappropriate?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. -
Inappropriate?Tracker 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.2 Comments Add a comment
This is one of the best points
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Where should I signup? I would love to get some totals for our projects :)
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Send an email to tracker@pivotallabs.com, and we'll turn it on for you account.
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