Time Tracking: Recording your Time with Jira

by | Dec 8, 2021 | Agile

In the last article, “Sprint Management with Jira: Estimating Your Velocity” we discussed how to plan work for a Sprint. Teams may simply estimate their time in hours and while others might estimate in story points. We mainly looked at how this would take place during the Sprint Planning Meeting. These hours are estimated up front. ScrumMaster may want to know how many actual hours are used. Some Teams may bill for hours as used so they need to be precise with every activity they do. Others might only want to see how accurate the Sprint Planning meeting was in estimating Stories.

For this article, we will discuss how to use Jira to record the time you spend on an issue. In addition, we will discuss some of the AddOn options that can be used to give enhanced time keeping functionality and reporting.

Jira Software provides an “out of the box” solution to recording your time. Within an issue, select More > Log Work. You can enter the time that was spent in terms of weeks, days and hours. You can also set an Original Estimate that you can Log Time against.

Jira Software also has reporting to show estimated time vs actual time. While these reports do give information displayed by Version, there are limits to the information these reports will show.

Tempo TimeSheets provides an enhanced time keeping experience. The interface makes it easy to search for issues and enter time. Timesheets can be submitted for approval. Reports can be customized and created based on different criteria. Tempo also has Teams that members can be on. This creates an approver and team member structure allowing easy planning and approval.

Tempo Time sheets works great for Teams that need to report their time and can do so after an issue is completed.

Some Teams may not be able to record time after an issue is complete and may want a timer to run that can be started and stopped.

For those that use Jira Service Management – an SLA (Service Level Agreement) – provides time tracking that can start begin recording when an issue is picked up by an Agent and stop when an issue is closed. An issue might have multiple SLAs to track time such as Time to First Response and Time to Resolution. SLAs are customizable and you can choose criteria to start/stop and pause the clock on.

If you would like to use a Timer to record time used for Jira Software or even have other Apps such as Trello, Gitlab, and Monday.com to integrate time keeping functions –  Clockify may be a solution. Clockify can be integrated with these apps.

For Jira Software, The Free version of Clockify uses an API key you can paste into each app. You can also set a webhook for notifications.

A View from Jira Software:

Monday.com uses an extension for a browser such as Chrome to link to Clockify.

A view from Monday.com:

While having an App like Clockify between different Cloud apps can be helpful – Managing many cloud apps with time keeping functionality can be tricky. It’s helpful to decide which apps will have time activities recorded and which will not.

Time Tracking can be helpful for many groups. Accounting and Billing may need to know the time spent developing software to bill a client. ScrumMasters may need to see how much to adjust the velocity for the time actually spent vs estimated for the next Sprint Planning meeting. Managers may need to know how much billable a development team worked on. Using time tracking at Jira or Monday.com can take the time out of time keeping for your team.

If you are interested taking your Team’s Agile Processes and Tools to the next level, contact Ascend Integrated.

Ascend Integrated is proudly partnered with Atlassian and monday.com mentioned in this article. Ascend Integrated can also develop Clockify integrations with your app suite. Ascend Integrated also has Gitlab configuration capabilities.