Hi!

I’d like to have a word about Visual Studio add ins. I’m convinced that VSTS/TFS guys when provided the possibility to create different kinds of add ins, thought about such people, as, for example, I am.

Look, any company that uses VSTS in their software product development and management processes, has not only developers among their staff, but also a number of non-technical specialists of all kinds who do not code, and do not use Visual Studio in their everyday working activities. But as well as developers, they have to utilize some of the VSTS/TFS functionality, in terms of receiving and tracking their tasks, for example.

I suppose, entering TFS each time to check for new tasks, to track their time spent on those tasks, etc. might bring some difficulties, as the environment is completely unfamiliar. So Visual Studio add ins may become a great way out. Let’s take, for example, add ins that allow people work with TFS through the Microsoft Outlook interface that is familiar to most employees. This can improve productivity, as they do not have to spend their time on investigating an unknown interface, and at the same time, work together with the rest of the team.

You may ask, why I’ve chose such a strange phrase for a headline. The answer is simple; I’ve met this phrase in somebody’s blog post, where unusual reasons for using time tracking tools were listed. I liked this one, as well as two more:

Because it’s the second more fun thing you can do with your right hand.

Because your granddad punched that time clock on the shop floor every day for 30 years, and you can’t click a mouse?

Nice ones, don’t you think so? In fact, it is not so easy to motivate people track their time spent on tasks. It’s a usual thing to hear from a developer, for example, about being distracted by the need to enter spent time into a task time tracker after each fulfilled task, or when switching from one task to another. While it takes only a couple of clicks.

I’m sure, many project managers have faced the challenge of making people understand the need of accurate time tracking. Explain how important is to collect and calculate billable hours, to report the right amount of them to a client. It’s normal for employees to be paid right and on time, so the fact that tracking the time spent on tasks accurately is the way to get that, is quite motivating.

Companies spend thousands on automated time tracking systems to have their productivity increased, to understand what more should be done to improve, to make accounting and billing more accurate, etc. So why not just use it without making PMs invent some tales about angel’s wings to motivate us?

No project connected with software development will survive without management. Evaluation of the efficiency of the resources assigned to a project can’t be done without proper analysis of time and efforts spent by developers on different tasks. Using spreadsheets with needed data, and do almost manual calculations… well… may be possible for a small project, but will never fit for big and complex product development.

Designed specially to help manage the resource aspect of the project, project resource management software including time tracking tools and timesheets fits small, as well as big and complex projects. No matter, will it be a desktop or web-based solution, when customized for your particular needs it is able to bring value to the business.

This value is not, actually, in making nice reports for presentations, neither it is in more accurate billing (however, accurate billing is essential). The main value of project resource management software is tracking the dependencies, analyzing productivity, and managing available resources the way to improve software development lifecycle processes.

In other words, while not moving the project toward its aim, project resource management tools help to find ways to do this more efficiently.

Each business has different requirements for company’s management processes. While the benefits of utilizing timesheet software are becoming clear for more and more organizations, the need to customize it to answer company’s management needs is still elusive. However, well customized timesheets may provide more useful information to analyze.

Here are some more words in favor of customization:

When a company has its one special project, and everybody got used to particular terminology, it’s a kind of difficult to conform to the terms used in newly implemented timesheets. Customization lets to continue with familiar wording. Handy, doesn’t it?

The possibility to create customized reports is also an advantage, for retrieving only the data that this peculiar company needs to analyze in order to take right decisions in the future.

The life’s changing. So do the business goals and needs of any company. Customization is a great way to avoid investing in new timesheet software, when the existing seems not answering company’s needs any more. So customizing the software helps keeping it up-to-date with all company’s changes.

Progress tracking is essential for Agile development. It helps understand whether a team is doing the things right, find tough places in current iterations, and estimate the approximate dates of the release. As one of the backgrounds of agility is increasing efficiency and minimizing waste, time tracking is a necessary part of software development lifecycle. Time tracking powers accurate progress information by gathering information of the time spent on this or that part of the project and showing real project progress.

Many development teams use various types of time tracking, time reporting software, timesheets, etc. to manage Agile projects. Time reporting information allows estimating costs, counting salaries, forecasting the resources required for projects. But this is possible only when the time tracking is well-organized across different organizational units.

Not long ago I’ve met such thought in the web that agile time tracking should only track what is required. In other words, there should be gathered only time tracking data that is just enough to track the project process. Well, that makes sense if a team is focused on a single project for a period of time. Then the actual time spent on each task isn’t as important as velocity in terms of story points (abstract measure with no relevance to actual hours). The latter allows gathering enough information for accurate estimations and profitability calculations. Thus, there is no problem with managing even fixed bids projects using story point estimates and velocity. But still, this makes sense only if done accurately.

And, here comes, probably the main issue with time tracking – there are not so many people who like doing it. I’m sure, almost everyone who has ever dealt with time reporting had such situations at the end of the week (two weeks) when s/he had to remember what was done during the period. And very often this comes out of the imperfection of time tracking software (bad tasks categorizing, user-unfriendly interface, etc.). In other words, software is not so quick and simple to motivate people using it. Actually, it’s a charge of those responsible, to find the software that answers all team’s requirements (well, that’s in ideal world). Anyway, there is a choice, there plenty of tools, starting from TFS templates for Agile and ending with various proprietary and open source solutions.

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