Time tracking on Agile projects is important.
Planning
In a pure Scrum process, user stories are broken into tasks by the Team during sprint planning. Each task is then estimated in hours. This is done to see if the team can actually fulfill their potential obligation. So for instance, if the team has a total of 80 hours available for a sprint, and the tasks for all planned stories equals 90, then by the laws of physics we need to swap stories.
Where Are We?
We also need to track time during the project. A sprint burndown chart shows us whether or not we are on target. This chart is updated based on tasks being completed and hours entered. If no time is entered, the chart isn’t updated, and we have no idea, at a glance, where we are on a project. Here’s an example of a sprint burndown:
Keeping the Right Mindset is Important
Often times, the powers that be want to track time to ensure that every employee is putting in at least 40 hours per week. They use the hour as the definitive measure of productivity. And how wrong they are. I have never seen anyone be productive 100% of the time. Developers and designers are creative people, and creativity isn’t turned on and off like a light switch between the hours of 9am and 6pm. In Agile, we use value creation as the metric.
So when looking at hours, use them for planning and status, and nothing more.
What is your experience with tracking hours?
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