Time Tracking Tools
We’ve acquired a new engineering manager at work so at long last we’re starting to put in place some of the things we’ve always said “we should do that” about for a long time but never actually gotten around to doing. One of those things is establishing how accurate our estimates are by actually tracking the time taken to complete the task. Other metrics may be useful later, but for now we just want to track time taken since time is our most limited resource.
The trouble is, I don’t know of any really good time tracking tools. Here’s the rough requirements:
- Must keep track of time taken on multiple jobs, some or all of which may be in progress at the same time.
- Must have some way of mapping the job back to it’s original assigned ID (probably a bugzilla number but could be a netsuite number, scarab issue or who knows what - we haven’t sorted out how to track tasks well yet).
- Preferably runs on OS X and Windows, OS X only is okay, Windows only is bearable, Solaris only is usable but not ideal - anything else only isn’t any use at all.
- Preferably provides a very simple way to start and stop the timer for a task. I get interrupted a lot during the day so it would be good to be able to “hit the pause button” with a simple keystroke, ideally without having to bring the app to the foreground first.
- Needs to export to a format that can be manipulated. XML would be great, CSV is also good, funky proprietary text based thing that I’ve got to parse is okay, funky proprietary binary based thing is no good.
I’m thinking this is probably something I’ll wind up writing myself so that it works just the way I want so having the source code available would probably be a benefit as well. That way I can tweak instead of write from scratch.
So, any suggestions? What do other people use to track development metrics?
September 12th, 2004 at 10:51 am
We have an ugly system for tracking time. Accounting want the time in a system called Workplace (which is an Oracle Forms abomination!), but the rest of us want to (and do) use a tailored ClearCase/ClearQuest solution. Soon to be thrown out on the fact that it doesn’t actually do what it’s meant to, i.e. track the amount of time spent doing any given task.
September 12th, 2004 at 12:06 pm
I used titrax for years: easy to use, simple data format that I parsed myself. Runs on anything with X11. Don’t think it’s useful for tracking multiple simultaneous activities, which was fine for me as I can only do one thing at a time. Probably not good enough for your case, but worth a look if you don’t know it. The real reason for my comment is to say that I hope you’ll write about the solution you adopt when the time comes. By the way, your system clock is about 8 minutes fast.
January 22nd, 2005 at 12:59 pm
You may wish to check out the software by DOVICO Software at http://www.dovico.com as they have a very good (and inexpensive) solution that should do what you have outlined.
I have used there SDK and there XML exporting and it works very well for us. It is Windows based, but since it’s only 100 US per user and you receive a lot for the money, it’s a package worth checking out for project tracking and costing for project management.
September 15th, 2005 at 1:01 am
Hi there,
I’m facing the simillar problem. We are the software dev company and are looking for an issue tracking system that would provide a time tracking as well.
According to our research, there are tons of issue tracking solutions on the market. Some of them are based on Java that we prefer, as we do Java and are able to integrate Java solutions much easier with our existing systems.
IMHO, the best two issue tracker found were:
- JIRA (http://jira.atlassian.com/ - commercial) and
- Scarab (http://scarab.tigris.org/ - open source) but only JIRA seems to
But only JIRA is able to track the time spend on each task and produce some reports regarding the user load, project “time status” etc. We are currently evaluating this product.
Have you found any valuable solution please ?
Could you please let me know.
Thank you.
September 15th, 2005 at 1:01 am
Hi there,
I’m facing the simillar problem. We are the software dev company and are looking for an issue tracking system that would provide a time tracking as well.
According to our research, there are tons of issue tracking solutions on the market. Some of them are based on Java that we prefer, as we do Java and are able to integrate Java solutions much easier with our existing systems.
IMHO, the best two issue tracker found were:
- JIRA (http://jira.atlassian.com/ - commercial) and
- Scarab (http://scarab.tigris.org/ - open source) but only JIRA seems to
But only JIRA is able to track the time spend on each task and produce some reports regarding the user load, project “time status” etc. We are currently evaluating this product.
Have you found any valuable solution please ?
Could you please let me know.
Thank you.
May 17th, 2007 at 12:57 am
We use a piece of software called 1time
http://1timetracking.com
Really easy to use and gives us a good project cost analysis and even tells us our Employee utilization figures.
highly recomend it, tried a few others but this was the easiest to use.
December 7th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
If you have OS X, TimeCache looks pretty good. Wish it would integrate with Jira.
http://www.pandaware.com/timecache/index.html
December 7th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
Unfortunately just tried out TimeCache. It was not what I thought. Seems like there should be something out there that integrates with Jira that makes time tracking as easy as just a simple dropdown built-in to the system tray.
December 7th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
Assuming it works for you, this is also supposedly a pretty nice product to track flow time automatically if you are a software developer: http://www.6thsenseanalytics.com/