TFS needs the ability to track hours tied to a work item by date and user
Today TFS only has the ability to estimate how many hours it will take to finish the work item and how many hours completed.
But what is truly needed is an audit trail of how many hours were applied to a WI by whom on which date. This way we can do some accurate reporting.
irperez
shared this idea
As mentioned before, we’re not planning to do work in this area so we’re returning your votes. However, Ed mentions a good partner tool to check out:
http://www.imaginet.com/Solutions/ALM/Pages/Notion-Timesheet.aspx
Another option is to use Project Server integration.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg455680.aspx
13 comments
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Sven Hubert
commented
You may also want to think about customizations:
see http://blog.aitgmbh.de/2013/03/15/zeiterfassung-mit-team-foundation-server-teil-23-mit-anpassungen/ for details about an implementation we're using which lets the user book hours for a specific date. Contact me in case you're interested in more details. -
Sean
commented
This forces consulting time to be entered twice, once in TFS and once in a time keeping system. It seems like an easy add-on and well worth it. Other ALM tools have this, such as TeamPulse, Rally, Jira/Tempo, etc. Customers like to see line items with actual/estimated; and developers need to be able to enter and view their data over a period of time.
Imaginet's web site only states 2010 and seems out of date with no information.
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Oleg
commented
http://www.imaginet.com/Solutions/ALM/Pages/Notion-Timesheet.aspx
This is a dead link -
Anonymous
commented
I work with a small team of developers (3-4) that get paid an hourly rate. How would you suggest we implement this in the current iteration of tf services?
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Anonymous
commented
I didn't see any reason to decline this suggestion. This is a basic required feature for any workitem tracking tool.
It is very unfortunate that this feature is not part of TFS and MS is not ready to do it.
I think...there is an business/political reason behind it..."MS wants to feed its partners Or Project Server team" :)
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Ed Blankenship commented
Hi Derek! I definitely agree with your advice if your team is practicing a strict definition of Scrum or other similar Agile methodologies that would recommend not tracking actual completed work. However, there are organizations that haven't completed adopted this practice or others that have internal requirements around effort tracking. There are teams within larger organizations who are attempting to adopt as much from Scrum and Agile to be as successful as they can given their organizational constraints. Should even those teams worry heavily about how much work was done more than completion of future goals? Not at all. I agree with you there. They just may need to still capture that data appropriately to meet their internal requirements.
Also, as a consulting company, we've successfully used the Notion Timesheet product with our TFS data for nearly six years. We don't need/want another timesheet product when our consulting & project data is stored in TFS. It's a perfect match for us and I would suspect other organizations.
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Derek Licciardi
commented
SCRUM and Agile frameworks do not show time worked. The philosophy of the development methodology is only about what remains to hit the product goal. It's a culture and mind shift to get used to not measuring the water under the bridge. If you need it for consulting work, I suggest you use a timesheet product because TFS is not where you track consultant time. When the goal is to get stuff completed, worrying about how much time was spent to get you where you are today is wasting cycles and energy on a problem in the past.
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Aman Garg
commented
@Siddharth - Even if one person is assigned to a workitem, he is going to spend some time(hours,days, weeks) on the task. I wonder how can we generate the reports on the project management correctly if the basic component of capturing time over the period of time is not built natively into TFS...
Food for thought?
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FYI - Imaginet acquired Notion Solutions but Imaginet is continuing to sell & service the Timesheet product. It actually allows multiple people to track time against a single work item and contains database entries to allow you to see that breakdown. There is also an included warehouse adapter that pushes the data into the TFS Warehouse automatically so you can report against timesheet data using all of the other data available from the Work Item Tracking system...
Here's the new URL if you are interested in more informaiton! http://www.imaginet.com/Solutions/ALM/Pages/Notion-Timesheet.aspx
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A solution that might work for you is: http://www.teamexpand.com/
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Nice, Matthew! Our partner, Notion Solutions, also offers a third party timesheeting tool here: http://www.notionsolutions.com/Products/Pages/NotionTimesheet.aspx.
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Thanks irperez -- appreciate the suggestion and it makes sense. Unfortunately, In DevVNext, we're not planning on doing work in this area. The guidance here would be to use only one work item per person (vs. passing the work item between). I understand that won't work in the case of bugs. Another, heavier-weight alternative is to use TFS-Project Server integration and have the user enter their timesheet information in Project and build reports from there.
-Siddharth (PM on TFS) -
Matthew Rowan
commented
TFS Working On gets you someway there. http://tfsworkingon.com/
Disclaimer: My project.
