Plugin Profile: Time Tracking with Minyaa Suite
Wednesday, 22 September 2010 20:10
This is a guest blog post submitted by Vincent Thoulé. Vincent started his journey with JIRA by implementing CMMi in IT services for a European Bank. After 4 years of committed work on Kaamelot, in 2009 he accepted to join Pyxis Technologies in Montreal in order to continue the JIRA adventure on a full-time basis.
This is a 3-part blog series. The first will focus on using Minyaa for time tracking; the second and third will go in-depth on Minyaa's other modules.
Looking Back
Minyaa Suite turned 1 year old!Minyaa Suite was born to replace the Kaamelot plugin, a plugin created 5 years ago which merged all the enhancements that I was able to bring into JIRA to address our needs.
From these original themes, we have identified 5 value added modules + 1 technical module.
The value added modules:
Minyaa Time for all features around Time Management
Minyaa Workflows for all features around Workflows usage
Minyaa Spread for features around Linking and Cloning Issues
Minyaa Projects for features around managing JIRA Projects (stay tuned)
Minyaa Tools for miscellaneous features
and the technical module:
Minyaa Core providing licenses, installation and upgrade managers, targeted at JIRA plugins developers
For this post, I'll be focusing on Minyaa Time and how you can use it to assist you with time tracking.
Minyaa Time
The main activities related to Time Management are Time Tracking, Time Reporting and Time Approval. With all versions of Minyaa released to date, we've covered the 2 first activities.
Often, Time Tracking resembles "Time Pursuit"! Most of you already know that!
Spent time not logged by your team members means:
- Incorrect metrics.
- Lost money (not charged, mis-charged).
- ...
There are other ways to track time:
- Harassing team members every week (this may bring conflict and burn-out to managers!).
- Hiring a virtual agent (one of my colleagues can present a good, inexpensive candidate).
- Providing your team members an easier way to enter worklogs.
Enter Worklogs Quickly
One of Minyaa's goals is to provide this solution through Fast Worklog Gadget. Each user is able to see this gadget in his JIRA Dashboard, displaying all issues on which he works (or wants to work on), with his latest entered worklogs.
From this Gadget, a user will be able to create/update his Worklogs:
Your team members will be able to more quickly input time spent on Issues on which they are working, since these Issues are always listed on their Dashboard.
Refine your Timesheets
Currently, a Timesheet is more like a grid of type Integer where the unit will depend on the activity: 15m for Hotline (it is the exception), 1 hour for Support, 2 hours or more for Software development...
With Minyaa Time, you will discover that the time logged reflects the real picture:
Smaller Issues will emerge and real spent time will become visible.
In other words, your team members may find it more convenient to enter worklog, and then will enter a real time progressively during the day, instead of at the end of day (or the week!).
Keeping Track of your Worklogs
By the way, as soon as a worklog is entered, Minyaa creates two explicit links with the Issue (Has Worked On and Is Working On relations) and you are able to request from the Issue Navigator all issues on which a user has worked on or is working on, using one of the Workers Customfields.
Another Customfield allows you to enter worklogs during a Workflow Transition. But the feature may become obsolete... Atlassian has resolved JRA-868 in JIRA 4.2 ... Nice!!!
A concept of Worklog Type exists and allows you to qualify each entered worklog with any custom value, such as Study, Analysis, Test, Development, Billable or Not Billable.
As a team manager, if needed you can enter Worklog for one of your team members, and finally access Worklog Reports where you will be able to define an aggregation criteria that makes sense for your business needs.
Minyaa Time Reports
Minyaa Time Reports may be displayed in different formats:
- In Day Fraction (DD,##)
- In Pretty (JIRA format : 1w 4d 6h 30m)
- In Hours Fraction (HH,##)
- In Hours (JIRA format : 36,5h)
- In Day (JIRA format : 4d 6,5h)
Minyaa Time reports are able to aggregate Worklogs using most fields:
- Issue System Fields (most of them are supported)
- Issue Custom Fields (including Workers Customfield)
- Worklog Fields (Author, Start Date (Day, Week, Month or Quarter), Worklog Type)
See samples below:
 Project, Worker, Worklog Date Day, Issue expressed in JIRA Pretty format |
 Project, Worker, Worklog Date Week, Issue expressed in Day Fraction |
 Project, Worker, Worklog Date Day, Issue expressed in Day Fraction |
 Project, Worker, Worklog Date Day, Issue expressed in Hours |
 Worker, Worklog Date Month, Project, Issue expressed in Hours |
 Worklog Date Quarter, Worker, Worklog Date Month, Project expressed in Hours |
In future releases, Minyaa Time will be improved in terms of flexibility (how to configure each report), design (more JIRA 4.0 like) and other features ...
Learn More!
You can download the plugin, check compatibility on Atlassian's plugin repository, and find the documentation from Minyaa's Download page.
Read more: JIRA Product Blog
