Comments on: A New Idea about Time Tracking

By: John

John — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 01:09:25 +0000

We had a similar dilemma. We needed our developers to track time better on our projects. Our solution was to build in web-based timers at the task level. That way, when the engineer opens up a task/bug to work on, they just hit the play button. When they are finished typing their notes into the task and change the status, they stop the timer and apply their time. We use subversion for our versioning, and record the corresponding task number each time we commit our code.

We’ve turned our experiences into a web-based project management service that anyone can use. Check it out at http://www.myintervals.com/

By: TomQ

TomQ — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 01:58:47 +0000

This reminds me of the old OS/2 project when IBM used to pay Microsoft based on the number of lines of code (SLOC) they produced. At the time, Microsoft said it was not a good indicator since a programmer could write the most optimized code for a particular functionality and they wouldn’t get paid based on how small and optimized the code was, just the number of lines of code.

By: Jörn Zaefferer

Jörn Zaefferer — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:29:56 +0000

I like the code-delta idea. You wouldn’t even have to ask someone to do an estimate when starting to use the system. Just let them work on something and show them the result actual delta. Once they get an idea of it, they can start estimating their work before they start.

For the project manager to plan ahead he’d get time estimates based on the indiviuals delta/time relation. Eg. if Progammer A estimates Task B with 100 Code-Deltas, the system could calculate that Task B takes a week for Progammer A and only two days for Senior Programmer B.

By: Glen Lipka

Glen Lipka — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:19:27 +0000

@Robert: Definitely need to take things project/person specific. The key is to get a “pattern” for a short period of time (The next sprint) so you can plan and predict. This just seems like a way to get that pattern without asking people to fill in time cards.

By: Robert Schultz

Robert Schultz — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:29:01 +0000

I find your views on this very interesting. However using ‘lines of a code’ as a measurement of anything is prone to all sorts of problems.

The quality and quantity of those lines varies greatly not only from programmer to programmer, but project to project as well.

I suppose if you kept that in mind, that each project AND each programmer the ‘lines of code’ value is different, then there could be some benefit then.

Hrm…. at the very least your article has me thinking