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I work for a small tech start-up and we are trying to figure out an efficient way for track the developer's time and budget which doesn't take a lot for the dev team to fill in. An efficient way to track the tasks and time spent on it so that the business side can understand the internal costs. We found that hourly time tracking was not the best way to approach this and having the team fill in a google sheet wasn't successful. If you could share some tips and ideas to tackle this problem or if you could share your company's own success with time tracking, all help would be greatly appreciated.

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  • Hi Sonam, welcome to PMSE! As you can see in our guidelines, software recommendation tools are considered offtopic. Take a look at softwarerecs.stackexchange.com.
    – Tiago Cardoso
    Commented Nov 16, 2016 at 8:29
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    Perhaps we can start with what problem the company feels time tracking will solve?
    – RubberDuck
    Commented Nov 20, 2016 at 14:26
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    Can we make this question not about tool but approach? Especially selected answer looks like advertisement.
    – Piotr Uryga
    Commented Mar 16, 2017 at 10:57
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    This question does not appear to be about project management within the scope defined in the help center. In addition, the question solicits anecdotes and seems like a tool-shopping question.
    – Todd A. Jacobs ♦
    Commented Mar 20, 2017 at 2:12

6 Answers 6

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A tool won't save you. Discipline will. Other professionals, such as lawyers, do it all the time for decades, with accuracy, and without a fancy tool.

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    Interesting point, but developers find it hard to have discipline for stuff they think doesn't add any real value. And from my experience with time-tracking they are often right.
    – Niels van Reijmersdal
    Commented Nov 17, 2016 at 14:34
  • Developers don't typically need the data so it adds no value to them. I agree with you, @Neils van Reijmersdal. However, for other roles on any given project, the data is yuugely and bigly valuable. You need it to forecast cost on any given piece of work, you need it for historical purposes to help estimate future work. Two examples. There are more. They are "right" but only from their point of view.
    – David Espina
    Commented Nov 17, 2016 at 16:27
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Wonder if you really need to:

understand the internal costs

Maybe track it for a while, but don't force developers to track time unless it is absolutely necessary. Like billing clients per hour, but even then you could bill them on relative effort sizes and remove the need to track time.

You might wonder why shouldn't developers track-time? Let’s take a look at Jeff Sutherlands rant on the lameness of timesheets to see why:

Actually time sheets are worse than lame:

  • they demotivate developers
  • 10-15% loss of productivity is the minimum
  • developers have to fake the time to fill them out properly
  • erroneous data is used for reporting and management makes bad decisions
  • customers are deceived
  • they have nothing to do with quality code production
  • they focus the whole organization on phony data instead of production

Nevertheless, this is not enough for many managers to give up time sheets. Just like the waterfall process, there is a psychological dependency so strong, it is as if they are on drugs.

Developers are smart people who perfectly know when something they are doing is just waste. This is therefor very demotivating, they rather create code in the same time. So unless you can convince developers that tracking time is totaly worth it, just stop doing it, because it will cost you more than you think you gain.

It is not so hard to divide relative estimates by average team costs, to get an good idea what stuff costs.

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I would only worry about this if you really need to understand cost of goods sold, are doing billable work, or do accounting for software capitalization.

It's better to just track team throughput using velocity metrics. It vastly simplifies estimating and scheduling and once it matures it is a much better predictor of future performance.

All done without demotivating your engineers, so easier to get buy in to participate in estimating and planning.

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You can achieve this in multiple ways:

  1. Track time in real time, you can look for Toggl which is probably the most used of its kind
  2. Require your team to track time daily, this is what we are doing in my company. We actually block the access to the tool if you didn't track your time the day before.
  3. Track the time based on the tasks completed. This require to have estimated all the time needed for each tasks and if there is a difference between estimation.

Good luck

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For Developers time Tracking you should used Eilisys Ascent Employee Time Tracking Software. I am also using this software. This web portal software is easy to use handle, it has high security, Exception handling and many more features etc. Also available in affordable price and having good supportive team.

More details visit here : http://eilisys.com/blog/tag/employee-time-tracking-software/

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As someone earlier said, you should start with why do you need to keep tracking of developers? What is the business goal or problem you are trying to solve. There are many tools for tracking, but what is your goals. Will someone look at those tracking is another question, you should ask yourself.

As people said tracking developer create mistrust, I'm not saying that you should not care how they spend the time on work, but is there other approach you can take?

Think what are your goals, what are your problems you are solving. Most of the times implementation of solution like time tracking or screening can kill team spirit and lead to a cycle of mistrust.

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