Issue Time tracking

[Hasmik]

Is Issue Time tracking function useful for comparing primary estimation with the actual work time? Is it a handy function or effectiveness is low?

Please, share with your experience.

Does Issue Time tracking function give any other benefits? 

[Jack Hunter _HeroCoders_]

Well,

"comparing primary estimation with the actual work time"

When it comes to the estimation, I would suggest story points and velocity.  More can be found in a post shared by Earl in his answer: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/estimation

Long term, the velocity allows planning the project in a predictable way. 

"Does Issue Time tracking function give any other benefits?"

Yes. It gives many benefits.

Story points and velocity allows tracking "team" performance (which is perfect for planning purposes), but not tracking an input of individual users or time spent against particular issues.

Logging time by individual users against issues gives better insight into the project health and condition. With proper and precise time tracking you can answer following questions:

• How much time did an individual user spend/work in a given period of time? So, for example, you can get billed for the proper amount of work done.
• How much time did the company spend on a given project? So, for example, you can asses the cost of the project or bill the customer.
• In which status the issues spend most of the time? So you can see if the process is right or has roadblocks (if for example development takes four days on average, but testing and QA takes nine days).
• How much time did team spend on an individual issue? So, for example, you can spot the problem if time spent on particular issue types is much longer compared to the other issue types, while the estimations are similar.

Overall, time tracking is must have for the companies and users that bill or get billed according to time worked. For others, it is still a useful tool to track the health of the project. 

In all cases, time tracking should be precise to give meaningful and proper insight into work done. In some cases, it saves a lot of money too. 

Clockwork Automated Timesheets for Jira allows increasing the precision of time tracking significantly through an automated integration with Jira workflow. It also offers a simple manual mode with a Start/Stop timer button as well as the reports to analyze logged time. 

Time tracked by the Clockwork is stored in Jira worklog, so it is available for built-in Jira reports as well as third-party apps. 

I hope it helps :)

Cheers,
Jack

[Earl McCutcheon]

H Hasmik,

In general terms Story points are a measure of complexity, and work-logs are about elapsed time.

I would recommend checking out the Blog Post "The secrets behind story points and agile estimation" that goes into the differences between the two in more detail.  But ultimately comes down to how you're planning, whether you're looking for a general weighted metric that can be narrowed with time, or a highly granular time based metric that is a static input and output.

Regards,
Earl