Allnetic Time Tracker
June 3, 2008
In any project it is always good to know where you spend your time and is especially important in agile development. In our team developers sign up to complete a task in a given period usually around the day to half a day time period. Things don’t always go as planned and some tasks can take longer for various reasons ranging from being pulled into meetings to you underestimated the task. I use a cool little time tracker called allnetic to track my time. Some of the cool features that are useful are:
- Can track time at a project, task and sub task level.
- prompts you when you stopped typing to see if you want to include the time, (eg you go to lunch and forget to stop your time tracker).
- Can produce time reports in various formats and you can even create your own by customizing several standard templates.
- Allows you to include comments as you are recording time. This is good for me when I hit a problem so I can work out later why something took longer then estimated.
- Portable, you can just copy the exe onto a usb key and run it where ever you work
- Good for contractors working for multiple clients as you can track time, invoice clients and provide them with a detailed log of your activity. Clients are usually impressed when you turn over detailed log of the time you worked on their project.
- If someone comes over to your desk for some help or you get foxed away from your development task you can quickly switch the time to another task and add a comment
We do not use allnetic as a management tool but rather a developer aid to help manage their time and help provide better estimates based on past activity. In your team the tool should be optional not mandatory as you want developers to want to use it. You should get them to try it they might be surprised where their time goes, (easy way to highlight how much time can be wasted in administration and meetings).
Check it out at www.allnetic.com
