Where should we log work during iteration planning?

[Erwin Saegesser]

Hi Jira (or Greenhopper) Team -

After an evaluation phase we've now introduced Jira/Greenhopper to a first dev team. All works fine and we have setup the project.

What we want: We want to log work during iteration planning (and grooming) as well as during the iteration itself. The latter is well understood and we don't see an issue (estimated/work/remaining etc.).

Problem: Where can we log work during the whole planning and grooming phase? Do you have any best practices? We found that we could log work for stories (the tasks would be to used to log work during the iteration). But what about general discussions which aren't related to a single story? Example: We spent (3 devs) one morning organizing and grooming our backlog. We created releases and dates etc.. Where would we log that work?

Remark: I'd like to avoid logging all the work in our ERP (in addition to what we log in the tasks).

Thanks in advance,
Erwin

[Ivar · Accepted solution]

We created a 'Generic time tracking' issue type and creates Planned leave, Sickness, Sprint Planning, etc., for every sprint. People log the time used on these tasks and since they have fix version set for the given sprint, time is logged per iteration. Works like a charm for us.

[Erwin Saegesser]

Hi Ivar - Thanks for the suggestion. Does it mean that: 1) You create on issue of type "Generic time tracking" per iteration? 2) Where do you assign the subtypes? Do you use the comments field or have you added a custom field with enumerators such as "planned leave"? Would be great to get the details.

[Ivar]

Actually we have several issues of type 'Generic time tracking', one per item, like sickness, planned leave, training, sprint planning, etc. Everything that isn't really related to development. Usually we have 8 issues of type generic time tracking per sprint: QA related work (like test-cases), BA related work (requirements gathering), Planning, sickness, public holidays, planned leave, deployment activities and DBA related (if there are additional work other than developer work).

Your suggestion with subtypes would actually make it better as you could create one main issue for each sprint and then add sub tasks of types Planned leave, sickness, etc. to that issue. That would aggregate the time spent up to the main issue and you would get a very simple overview (and at the same time be able to take out a report on all subtasks of type sickness throughout the project/year/period).

[Erwin Saegesser]

Thx Ivar - Best regards, Erwin

[Ivar]

NP. Feel free to accept my answer as the answer if you feel it was good enough :)