Do you use 'time tracking' stories?

[Jan Wagner]

Hi,

we have some stories, that we just use for the time tracking of reoccuring tasks (like meetings, daily business, ...). This leeds to some never ending stories.

Is this a good practise or is there a better way?

[Ignacio Pulgar · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jan Wagner 

On its own, I'd say that is not a bad practise.

However, your reporting requirements and the presence/absence of an additional app for showing the time spent for a given period might influence the best choice.

Provided that work logs count with their own date, duration and work logger, I'd stick to tracking time in a single Jira issue as opposed to creating sepparated Jira issues for each of the recurring tasks unless there were a good reason for doing it otherwise, provided that the number of issues in a Jira instance is known to have an impact on its overall performance.

Hope it helps.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Yep, we have a handful of them in separate projects - it's mainly to make sure our automations lead to clear reporting that stop people having to ask questions about what individuals are up to.  For example, our consultants have a wide range of clients and non-client work too.  Obviously we need to report time worked for each client, so that gets logged on client issues and you get reports like "Dave spent 8 hours on client 1 and 16 on client 2", but we also want to know what Dave was up to for the other 16 hours of their working week.

So we have issues for logging time as holiday, sickness, training, non-client meetings, marketing, talking to product teams, covid-inspired other time (not sick themselves, but having to isolate, or do care for the family etc), and and and.  

As a manager, having those non-billable issues means I can just tell my people "log a 40 hour week and I'll not bother you" and then do any "what were they doing" analysis without having to ask each individual.  My managers can look at the broader swathe and see how much people are dedicating to improvement or marketing or being ill or or or.

[andrew_pass · Accepted solution]

We use these to suit a business requirement to see roughly where times being spent outside of development.

We set up new issue types for -

• Meetings
• Objectives
• Training & Admin

Allows us to identify any trends across the teams or to easily see where teams might be spending too much time in excess meetings.

I used the automation tool in JIRA to automatically create and add them to sprints as a sprint is created and also to then close them down at the end of a sprint, cuts down on admin, we've also added quick filters to hide them on the board as desired for the team.