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How time spent on a task is tracked?


Zheng Xie (1632) | asked Aug 12 '09, 9:21 a.m.
In the Overview tab of a task, there are the following fields:
Estimate
Correction
Time Remaining

Wonder what Time Remaining means? And what is Correction?
Where time spent is tracked.
If only time Remaining is logged, how burn down chart is calculated?

Thanks for you help.

3 answers



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Michael Scharf (781) | answered Aug 12 '09, 11:57 a.m.
the SCRUM process uses time remaining rather than time spent to track the effort, ie work items are initially estimated and as the work progresses, time remaining is decreased.
Behind the scenes, there's only a "Time Spent" value stored with the work item, the time remaining is simply calculated as Estimate - Time Spent.
This behavior can be changed in the Process Configuration tab of the Project Area editor. Navigate to "Project Configuration" -> "Configuration Data" -> "Planning" -> "Work Item Progress Mode". There's a dropdown where you can choose "Time Spent" tracking over "Time Remaining" tracking.
Note that there are issues when using "Time Remaining" in RTC2.0, which will be fixed for 2.0.0.1 (https://jazz.net/jazz/resource/itemName/com.ibm.team.workitem.WorkItem/89024)

As for the correction, if this value is set, the first, original estimate value is overridden by the corrected estimate. This allows tracking of a "revised" estimate.

--
MikeS
Jazz Agile Planning team

zhengxie wrote:
In the Overview tab of a task, there are the following fields:
Estimate
Correction
Time Remaining

Wonder what Time Remaining means? And what is Correction?
Where time spent is tracked.
If only time Remaining is logged, how burn down chart is calculated?

Thanks for you help.

permanent link
Zheng Xie (1632) | answered Aug 13 '09, 12:01 p.m.
Thanks Mike, I find "time remaining" is slightly confusing. Say the time estimate is 2 days, at the end of the second day, time remainng is 0, but task is not finished. What do we do? In the morning of the 3rd day, edit correction as "1 d", edit time remaining as "1 d"?
Time spent is more straight forward. At the end of each day, just accumulate time spent. When task is finished, edit correction as (time spent - estimate).
So now in the team, we have changed the configuration to use Time Spent.
What is your opinion? Is my understanding right?
Thanks again.

permanent link
Michael Scharf (781) | answered Aug 13 '09, 1:09 p.m.
the next morning you would set the correction to "3 days", as this is the overall "corrected estimate" for the task, and set "time remaining" to 1d.

Personally, I prefer to work with the "Time Spent" too. It's probably a matter of personal preferences, and therefore it's good that it's configurable :-)
SCRUM users usually prefer "Time Remaining", that is why we set it as the default for the SCRUM template.

--
MikeS
Jazz Agile Planning team

zhengxie wrote:
Thanks Mike, I find "time remaining" is slightly confusing.
Say the time estimate is 2 days, at the end of the second day, time
remainng is 0, but task is not finished. What do we do? In the
morning of the 3rd day, edit correction as "1 d", edit time
remaining as "1 d"?
Time spent is more straight forward. At the end of each day, just
accumulate time spent. When task is finished, edit correction as
(time spent - estimate).
So now in the team, we have changed the configuration to use Time
Spent.
What is your opinion? Is my understanding right?
Thanks again.

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