Time Tracking in TFS

From the mind of Gregg Boer: This is the first of a series of my thoughts on time tracking in TFS.

OK, we have heard quite a bit on time tracking in TFS. People have asked when we are putting it in.

You mention time tracking, and you get mixed emotions. Executives feel they need it. Developers and Testers hate doing it. Managers get sick of nagging people to “enter their timesheets”.

In my experience, very few teams actually do it, and if they do track time, even fewer use the data, unless your work is billable. Hardly anyone uses it to actually improve how the engineer software.

Why is that? I think there are three basic reasons why:

· It takes a great deal of infrastructure (tools) to track time effectively. Most teams don’t have this available to them.

· Most project managers confuse time tracking (recording history) with status tracking (predicting future) … so we get things like “Enter your completed work and your remaining work on your tasks”. Time tracking and status tracking are two different things.

· Most people don’t know what to do with the data, even if they did have it. I’ve seen too often were teams track time, but did nothing with the data.

Those are my thoughts, what are yours?